The Library of Resistance Part 2 Project 2020 Joe Gibbs University of the West of England | UK Framing the project through Giancarlo De Carlo’s philosophy of resistance (McKean, J. 2004), the work follows a brief to use the function of a library and its collections as a model of adding social value to the city. Set within Bedminster, Bristol, an area facing rapid gentrification and uneven development caused by a constant drive for economic growth.This approach to architecture promotes an excessive consumption of energy, natural resources, and increased CO2 emissions. ‘The Library of Resistance’ examines how an architecture of de-growth can resist against the social, political, and economic structures at play within the city, putting the people and environment first. The projects views architectures as material banks to be reimagined sustainably, liberating structures from the ridged intentions of their makers, recycling their physical parts and the intangible everyday lived experience of the city. The library is entirely comprised of materials re-purposed from the sites existing warehouse, and ‘R-Block’, the local school of architecture. The project is a public reconfiguration of materials, allowing a re-colonisation, and re-claiming of the urban fabric of Bedminster. Taking precedents from the radical event Anarchitecture of the 1960’s, viewing the city as a performative space, a result of public action and processes. Joe Gibbs The proposal researched the context of the everyday in Bristol’s libraries to ask how architecture could provide a distributed knowledge platform for a wider public access to both the university and methods and materials for sustainable self-build, and a programme for a new form of public space.The thesis took on ideas of an architecture of de-growth and social, material sustainability through re-purposing materials from the demountable school of architecture as a rapid response to the Covid-19 pandemic and construction of the on site Nightingale hospital.As part of a sustainable strategy the proposal is that materials could be redeployed to an exiting warehouse structure in the south of the city as a self build manual, using designs for simple, low technology construction methods and buildings as material banks to provide resistance to particular forms of gentrification for a localised response to regeneration.The methods include cutting, re distributing and transporting existing built materials to form a redistributed learning space (library) where built construction stands as a form of knowledge creation and sharing. The ethos of the new library spaces are towards accessibility, both as a conventional library archive and as a materials and construction resource centre and performative architecture. Tutor(s) Dr. Tonia Carless Louise Ciotti