Intermediate 18 understands architecture not simply as the construction of buildings but as the materialisation of thought. At its most potent, architecture actively contributes to the production of public knowledge and shapes our cognitive and collective frameworks.

Knowledge does not arrive whole. It crystallises through fragments: discrete observations, disciplinary residues and contested precedents which are gathered, restructured and reimagined into provisional frameworks through which new modes of thinking may emerge.

Architecture, as a form of knowledge, mirrors this process of contingent and continuous assembly. To design is to navigate a field of partialities and fragments of spatial logic, material articulation, sensory intensity and programmatic intent – each charged with latent potential. 

Libraries, seen as repositories of accumulated thought, serve as infrastructures through which new knowledge can continuously emerge. However, in an era marked by digital excess and informational ambiguity, the library faces a paradox. It is simultaneously threatened by obsolescence and uniquely positioned to reinstate itself as a civic engine for collective imagination and speculative inquiry.

This year, we focus on the British Library and its evolving presence and expansion within the topography of the King’s Cross Knowledge Quarter in London. Emerging from the charged intellectual and spatial lineage of the British Museum Reading Room, the British Library has already begun to reconsider its institutional role, aspiring to shift from a static archive to a dynamic platform – mediating access, nurturing participation and welcoming transformation.

We will produce large-scale fragments, conceived as propositional units with the capacity to adapt, recombine and proliferate into conceptual, spatial and operational frameworks. We will speculate about how architecture, like the library, might gather and reconfigure fragments into transformational frameworks, shifting the British Library from a custodian of inherited knowledge into a fertile ground for public speculation, imagination and collective thought.