Floating Books

A Portable Reading Room

Bee Breeders “Portable Reading Room”
3rd Prize & BB student award
Published in “What is Small-Scale Architecture?”
Individual Work (Competition)
Time:07/2019-11/2019
Location: Ganzhou, China

Despite the rise of digital devices, demand for physical books is still strong, and even three-year-olds can benefit from physical books, becoming more engaged and making stories easier to remember. It seems that paper books still have their irreplaceable advantages. However, the access channels of paper books are relatively limited. In the traditional way, people can buy books from bookstores or the Internet or borrow books from the library, but either way is expensive or not very convenient. 

To make books easier to read and encourage reading, the designer avoided the problems by designing “Floating Books”, a portable mobile book device. It consists of a retractable height of 1 meter by 1 meter and 8 kg mobile book box and several helium-filled floating “clouds” connected by nylon wires. The “clouds” can not only be connected with each other as landscape markers, but also can be connected with the ground as a comfortable sofa. 

“Floating Books” not only serves as a book exchange, but also becomes a landscape sketch of the city, attracting people to stop here and awakening their desire to read. Its functions can change with the weather, time and site: when the sun is shining, it can be a place for people to cool down; When it rains, it can be a shelter from the rain; When night comes, the floating “cloud” painted with colorful fluorescent materials can attract passers-by with colorful colors and connect with the ground to become a comfortable sofa “cloud”.