THE LIVING ARCHIVE Varna’s new library has a unique opportunity to honor the city’s past as well as create a framework for the future. Historically, in eras such as the Bulgarian National Revival or the period of Soviet occupation, a tremendous outpouring of creative production transpired, uniting a collective in hidden private spaces—kitchens, living rooms, alleys. Our proposal mines these spatial types to set up a forest of structure that references notions of the individual—from the precarity of a single individual (column), to the strength of a cluster of individual (columns), to the power of carved out spaces of action (cores). This forest organizes the knowledge programs—reading, studying, playing, learning—in a fluid manner through creating ‘groves’ and ‘clearings’. This field of columns—while individually weak—as a whole, gains strength and supports a series of archival slabs containing past, present, and future forms of expression that represent collective information. The living archive is an expression of the diverse depth and collective strength of Varna’s citizens.