Applying a physical metaphor to what I am describing (to begin to see how this may affect the buildings it concerns) the internet seems similar to a great wilderness filled with jungle, forest, untamed nature, created en-mass with a seemingly endless amount of content and variety. The antagonist of this environment is life and death, nature dictates the ultimate course of each form in this jungle and creates seemingly infinite numbers of variations in which to do so. To me, this is what architects reference when they design unrestricted, free flowing buildings that are imbued with a sense of what the future will be like. As seen in the Landscapes of the new SANAA library where the building's form allows limitless possibilities of interaction between its inhabitants as they are invited to graze around indiscriminately. In this perception of the net, complexity and mass information collects and amalgamates into an intangible domain that we call the internet. We can visit the jungle, study an area and wonder at the myriad to species we discover but we can never grasp the complexities of an entire rainforest, we can have a sound knowledge of the macro and micro conditions but this is nothing but an abstracted reflection of nature in its entirety. Similarly the individual never senses this mass participation or 'communion' when they twitter or blog, we act for personal interests and may occasionally represent a group. A tiger kills a deer with little thought of how it is participating in the life cycle of the forest. “How great is the sum of all our thoughts, if I should count them, they are more in number than the sand.” Psalms 139
Instead how we experience modern media comes under my second stated perception of the internet, a personal one.
Back to the metaphor of the jungle of information, what we shall celebrate about the future is similar to what we have celebrated in the past. Cities are the crowning achievement of civilisation, both in their beautiful and ugly forms. We began but utilising the very basic components of nature, tools, log huts, animals ploughing our fields. The jungle nurtured us at this stage; offered us what we needed as soon as we had learned how to take it. Eventually we built cities and our understanding of how to exploit our natural resources is now so powerful we now see ourselves above nature, we can order the jungle instead of the jungles chaos dictating our life's. In a very similar we this what we celebrate about the internet - what is a library but the physical celebration of books? Remember the first time you Googled? That remarkable resource gathering tool began to form some sort of order from the jungle as it told you that it achieved 98 000 results in 0.14 seconds and even though that information is unperceivable and useless to us, it is our moment of celebration proving how well we can organise the infinite variety of information. This is how I see the celebration of modern media being inscribed into a building, the library is city that tames, orders and farms the wilderness of information it is situated in.
As an architecture student and keeping this from being too theoretical, the metaphor is pulled towards the physical realm and how this affects the form of libraries specifically. All cities have large parks that offer a reference to what can be found outside their limits, areas that have been left in some resemblance to the wilderness they once were. These parks are recognised as a fundamental part of the success of the city but they are also another example of how humans celebrate organisation, city parks are tended by green keepers. Therefore our future media building has to suggest the vast variety of the internet while explicitly indicating that it is a building where information is accessible, undonting and useful at an individual scale inclusive to the whole of society. It is does not need to symbolise a limitless realm void of formal syntax and tradition but becomes a celebration of the exact opposite.