Year: 2016.
Type: Museum Additions.
The African American Museum & Library (AAMLO) in Oakland, California currently features African American art, periodicals, and an extensive collection of historical books. The satirical analogy is seen in the current building typology, a Carnegie library, which hosts all these African American artifacts. This beaux-arts beauty is a painful misinterpretation of what the library currently hordes.
My museum addition introduces a new face to the current AAMLO providing a sculpture garden, a daylight gallery, cafe, and a reading area that wraps the current building facade. A lightweight structure made out of wood and ETFE wraps the existing exterior structure and burrows into the core of the building; embellish the old and the new with daylight. The new spaces introduce contemporary program to continue a new legacy of art and literature of the space.
The museum addition essentially flirts between the old and new by maintaining the Carnegie facade and letting this immersive-lightweight structure reveal itself throughout.