This Pop-Up Library Will Be Built Entirely of Books

Bibliophiles in Berkeley, CA are dreaming up a library completely made of books. The pop-up installation, called Lacuna, will be constructed from 50,000 books they hope to give away for free at the first-ever Bay Area Book Festival this summer. The structure was designed and will be built by the FLUX Foundation, a local arts collective whose missions is to bolster communities through large-scale art installations.

The team drew up the blueprints of Lacuna with notions of public space in mind. As festivalgoers pull away books to take home, they will be effectively dismantling the structure, leaving only the library’s skeleton in their wake. Through this gradual deconstruction of the space, they will be able to witness how individual and collective choices and imaginings have the ability to create or take apart public spaces.

“Like a library, this structure creates a uniquely collaborative, civic space where we can collectively appreciate the important and varied contributions of our community, which is every day enriched by our collective literary landscape,” FLUX writes.

FLUX is currently running a $10,000 crowdfunding campaign to fund the project. They already have the books, the designs, the space to build in, and the volunteers—they now need to purchase construction materials. They’ve got 14 days left to raise the rest of their funding goal—an amounf of less than $5,000.

“More than just facilitating the circulation of the books, the intent of the collaboration between the Bay Area Book Festival and Flux Foundation was to create a unique space that enriches our connection to the written word and to illuminate the power that books hold as vessels of our collective knowledge and as records of our cultural heritage,” they write on their Kickstarter page.