Library of Working Memory

Authors

Wendy Stradley, Washington University in St. Louis

Files

Description

Site: St. Louis

My intention with the program as to develop an multiple-intelligence centered program open to the general public, which is geared towards children toddler through elementary school and older adults without debilitating motor facilities.

The specific age groups focused on in the design would be 3-7 and 65-75 (or those with the motor abilities of a 75-year-old).

The proposal hearkens back to the original conclusion of Room for Two exercise—the space most suited for intergenerational interaction was the one in which both young and older people could communicate to the best of their abilities. The sharing of memories and the idea of storytelling between age groups catalyzed the initial exercise as a community-minded space. After continued investigation into the formation of memory as it relates between young and older people, the proposal centered on the development of a library to contain stories of past and present. This could further benefit the community by providing a space to facilitate the development of more stories over time.

To play off of the idea of storytelling, the program enables older people and younger people to share memories of both the past and present through the partitioning of spaces by intelligence type. This pulls from Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. The basic seven initially proposed served to divide spaces and catalyze the built-in interactive components. They are: The Bodily-Kinesthetic Intelligence, the Interpersonal Intelligence, the Intrapersonal Intelligence, the Linguistic Intelligence, the Spatial Intelligence, the Logical-Mathematical Intelligence, and the Musical Intelligence. Every individual has a unique relationship with all of these intelligences, which can promote interaction between someone with high aptitude for an intelligence and someone with low aptitude for that same intelligence. The proposal plays off of this wax and wane by positioning spaces geared towards one intelligence at a diagonal relationship with another—whether by an oblique planar relationship or a vertical offset.

These spaces geared towards an individual intelligence then serve as an extension of the normal library services on the second floor. The library also tries to promote the interaction of old and young people in these spaces by providing incentive in the program. The most permanent inhabitants are the older people—the building would specifically set up a gallery space and mechanical workshop for older people to have a place to use communal machinery they might not have access to. They would promote their own businesses, and would be encouraged to use the separate intelligence settings as a supplemental workshop. The young children brought as part of after-school care for the neighborhood would then have a dedicated intelligence mentor within the space as a manner of course.

Publication Date

5-2019

Subject Categories

Architecture | Urban, Community and Regional Planning

Rights Statement

© 2019 Stradley

Recommended Citation

Stradley, Wendy, "Library of Working Memory" (2019). 2019 Spring Shared Sites: Design for Intergenerational Aging. 3.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/spring2019_greer/3