Posted on 05/23/2004 10:04:43 AM PDT by nwrep
Like a finely cut gem discovered among the river rocks, the new Seattle Central Library jumps out from the surrounding city. Eleven zigzagging stories tall, wrapped in a neatly pleated, diamond-patterned curtain wall, it isn't so much beautiful or ugly as alarmingly, excitingly foreign. Step through the doors, however, and what's most striking is how sensible the building is. Indeed, the architect who led its design, Rem Koolhaas, describes it, without a hint of irony, as "wonderfully old-fashioned."
That's the paradox of this building. From its gravity-defying form to virtually every material used in its interior, it leaves almost no architectural convention unchallenged. With an array of brilliant yellow escalators, waist-high signage, cave-shaped hallways and glittering, black fireproof flocking, the new library is also a lot of fun. Yet, every innovation in the $165.5 million, 363,000-square-foot facility aims to reaffirm the public library's most basic traditions.
To city librarian Deborah Jacobs, it answers the most basic questions: "How do you house books?" and "How do you plan for unknowable change?" Koolhaas describes it as an effort to sustain the "critical values of comfort, public dignity and serenity." Joshua Ramos, Koolhaas' partner-in-charge of the library's design, calls it "happily rational."
But library staffer Betty Tonglao, a 30-year-veteran, put the successes most plainly as she readied the business section for opening day: She loves the reading room, that 80 percent of library's books are on open shelves and that all the technology will free her to meet and serve the public.
Though Koolhaas' mixture of searing intellect, high fashion and global power connections have made him arguably the turn-of-the-new-century's most influential architect, such earnestness is at the heart of his firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA).
The new library offers a full tour of his theories -- a career-long obsession with vertical stacking, the necessity of an architectural "bigness" matching the new scale of cities, and the inspiring possibilities in unintentional "junk space" found inside and between more intentional buildings. But what may be most interesting about the Seattle library is how so much of its success is determined by everything except architecture.
Operationally, the library embodies and celebrates what the library is today: a Grand Central Station of information and communication. OMA quantified, systematized and designed discrete new spaces for each major library function. These functions were then almost casually leafed together and stretch-wrapped like so many shoeboxes, with the spaces between and on top becoming the places you read, study and very often enjoy breathtaking views of Elliott Bay, Mount Rainier and the surrounding buildings.
To OMA's free-form arrangement, the engineers Arup and Magnusson Klemencic Associates provided a uniquely open, bracingly provocative structure. The building's gravity is carried through the elevator core, 10 vertical columns and a series of extraordinary slanting columns that plunge through the floors. The library's side-to-side "lateral" stiffness is provided entirely by the skin in the diamond basket-weave of I-beams. Each of the 10,000 diamonds created is faced with glass, and the resulting greenhouse effect is mitigated by triple layers of glass sandwiching steel mesh that filter the sun's direct rays into a haze of light.
Technologically, the building both houses and embodies extraordinary advances. The building will be filled with a Wi-Fi cloud for cableless computing and, more importantly, so each librarian can be equipped with tiny Vocere phones allowing him or her to constantly roam, helping clients while easily answering phone-in questions through the reference switchboard. A computer scanning and conveyor belt system will route and sort 1,400 books per hour.
But the most elegant advancement of the library-as-machine philosophy is the book stacks. Arranged on a square spiral ramp rising at a gentle wheelchair- and bookcart-accessible pitch, the shelves unfold in a steady flow of the Dewey Decimal System unbroken by the arbitrariness of subjects or rooms. The system will allow the library's collection to grow from 900,000 items to 1.4 million without adding a single shelf.
For all its successes, the building is not without its shortcomings and future challenges. Foremost, its doorways are pinched, not extensions of the library's otherwise rich interior processions.
The spiraling book stack is an extraordinary concept elegantly resolved in every way except one: It's a cul-de-sac, leaving anybody wandering to lower numbered stacks at a dismal, confusing dead-end with no choice but to trudge back the other way.
With so much experimentation, even chief cheerleader Jacobs acknowledges nobody will know how well the building will really work until opening week and beyond. Indeed, with all hyperbolically positive press so far, it is hard not to think of the San Francisco Main Library. Designed by the esteemed James Ingo Freed in another major rethink of many of the library's functions, it earned similar plaudits only to wind up needing $28 million to fix what a consultant deemed "serious operational problems."
Though it only cost $270 per square foot, in contrast to San Francisco's $480, the Seattle library seems a more agile advancement of the library form. And as a work of important architecture -- whether for the moment or for the long haul -- it seems blessed by a too-often unmentioned ingredient to architectural success: luck.
In its revolutionary traditionalism, the Seattle Central Library offers its own political stand, promising to serve, symbolize and maybe meld the local and the global in a way only the greatest architecture can.
It sounds oddly cool!
But I confess I'm intrigued by those terminal seats.
There's been a spate of public library renovation in the San Jose, CA area lately, too.
"Like a finely cut gem discovered among the river rocks,"
That's all I needed to read, and then seeing the pics.
It reminds me of the horrible, overpriced, and underengineered government building in Goshen NY.
The Goshen building, which looks like it was built by children - upside down, has only 70% usable space on a good day.
The roof leaks, the upper floors aren't cantelevered enough so they're in danger of falling from the building.
When the new building starts to settle, there may be problems with this 'cut gem' among the 'river rocks' in the city.
Neets, art deco architecture reminiscent of the Goshen Gov building ping.
pretty, pretty...
After the collaspe of glass and steel in the French airport, I think I'll stay out of this library.
That and I live in So. CA
"Only" $270? For an 11-story building? A CUSTOM HOUSE, 1 story, costs less than $110 per square foot.
I remember a Frank Lloyd Wright line: A doctor can bury his mistakes, but all an architect can do is advise his client to plant vines.
$270 is reasonable for downtown Seattle. Prices there are more like $400/sqfoot.
ping
Will this building contain books and study rooms, or it is all open space?
Demonstrates a grasp of engineering and no taste.
Orange County seems to have learned their lesson. The new county buildings are much more sensible in architecture....almost boring in design....but very functional.
The first thing I thought of in looking at those pictures of the new Seattle library....."reminds me of the air terminal
in Paris"....and we know what happened there today (so far, five dead in the collapse).
True.
There's talk of flattening the old gov building once they've moved everyone out.
And then rebuilding something useful there.
I just hope they have a way to keep the bums out. The previous library had an unbelievable odor and bums would lounge around all day.
$165,500,000 / 363,000 sqft = $455.92 / sqft
All I see is acres of seagull sh*t having to be cleaned off those windows.
Not to mention water intrusion at all the millions of joints.
Yes, but the second to last paragraph says $270 per sf. Maybe the total price includes land?
"A CUSTOM HOUSE, 1 story, costs less than $110 per square foot."
Not here in California. For the most basic house with only carpet and vinyl floors (no tile), with composition roof, vinyl windows and with Formica counters runs about $120 sqft these days.
My parents applied for a permit 10 months ago. They designed their house based on the house costing about $70 a sqft (low end features) as based on a builder they had selected. That same builder demands $120 now. Over a 70% incease. This has become a serious problem for them.
I'm in the process of building a new home now as well. It is averaging about $140 a sqft when averaged over garage space, attic storage space and living space. Basically every square foot of usable floor space regardless of where or what it is for. If the costs were only based on living space it would be pushing $200 a sqft. I'm using better materials but not top end.
A year ago you could build a lower end home in California for $100 a sqft or less easily. Not anymore.
Or books, who knows.
I was half-wrong - which surprised me because of how correct I was over how pathetic the Experience Music Project was going to turn out - the library is fairly cool from the outside.
To really make it fit in, however, they're going to have to tear down the beautiful church a block over.
Even still, the book-to-space ratio is way too low in the library and it's not worth the money that was spent on it.
You have to love an architect who started out writing scripts for Russ Meyer :-)
Yes, the thought is unavoidable after jumping from the Paris thread to this one.
Also, I got a good jolt from the last Seattle earthquake from 200 miles away. Hope not to be standing under all that glass during the next one...
Seriously, Rem Koolhaas was considered Holland's most promising young screenwriter, before the film industry totally dried up there sometime in the early seventies. Some filmmakers there later managed to make careers for themselves in America (such as Paul Verhoeven, or Koolhaas's longtime friend Jan de Bont) or elsewhere in Europe (like Georges Sluizer, who worked in France). Others, like Koolhaas, turned their talents to other art forms. He did make an abortive return at screenwriting when he and fellow Dutch filmmaker Rene Daalder (who became a pioneering computer graphics and video artist) did a few unproduced scripts for Meyer.
Hope this is better engineered than the French airport terminal.
Didn't they finally build a new one?
If a building deserves to be razed, it's that one.
Yes, after much squabbling, time wasted, and money wasted they got a new one built.
Then didn't use it for a bit.
IIRC, there was a write-up about this nightmare in the local liberal rag.
They finally started moving some things over, but not everything.
Some nostalgia types have suceeded in keeping some things in that abortion of a government building.
From a security standpoint, they're nightmares, there really truly is no way to keep any one building secure since they have those flying catwalks and pavilions with outbuildings.
But there are reo-brainwave types who want the building repaired and used because of who designed it.
(Definately not Frank Llyod Wright[spelling?].)
Can't wait until they get rid of it.
They should first burn it, then blow it up.
Then burn it again just to be sure.
It is pretty.
I can't help but think about what this place would look like if it were built in the 1970's. From the pictures, this looks like it will age quickly, and not gracefully.
As my pop says, nothing looks old and dated faster than "modern".
Not digging the interiors. A disapointment. They had a lot of potential. I find the exterior interesting. I bet the building is quite striking at night. Koolhas is a bit of a bullsh*tter and is over rated for obvious reasons. Too hip for his own good. Hip does not equal well designed space.
Huh? $165,500,000/363,000 sq. ft. = $455/sq. ft.
More new math idiots.
What with glass floors, the view must be heavenly!
Looks great from the outside, doesn't it?
But half a year later, the rumbling is louder than the cheers. The place is hideously noisy. The main check-out desk is next to the children's area, surrounded by hard floors which clatter, echo, and magnify the clamor. It's impossible to have a conversation with the hurried check-out clerks because neither party can hear over the din. And it's so ugly. The wooden floor is gimmicky, but the rest of the space looks like a very nasty warehouse or factory. Concrete, conveyor belts, more concrete, metal, dull brown resin flooring, more metal. A bleak, angry, inhospitable interior.
It's obviously wretchedly understaffed, with a few tense, unsmiling clerks running the length of the big desk to man several stations, and librarians nowhere to be found. Every employee there looks harried and overwhelmed, and from my observations many patrons are routinely frustrated by the lack of service (too-few clerks, long lines, and failing self-service stations) and the general chaos of the place. What an overhyped lemon. Seattle has my pity.
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