The vision is to get 100 carefully chosen authors to submit a manuscript each, one a year, and safeguard the works, unread, for a century, when they will be unsealed and published as a testament to the passage of time, mankind’s endurance and the hope that was imbued in the project by the generations that came before.
The manuscripts are sealed inside the “Silent Room” at the city’s spectacular public library, the Deichman Bjorvika. Designed by artists and architects Atelier Oslo and Lund Hagem alongside Paterson, the Silent Room is hidden away on Deichman’s top floor, where Norway’s oldest book is being kept similarly safe from a possible flood.
One hundred layers – one for each year and author – line the undulating walls of the Silent Room, folding on top of each other in soft, asymmetric curves from floor to ceiling. They resemble tree rings and are made from the wood of older trees that have been felled to make space for the Future Library forest – a process of continuous regeneration carried out as part of the maintenance of the managed forests around the city.
Margaret Atwood’s manuscript at the Future Library
Jan