Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library has a genesis that stretches back long before he won the

1999 competition for its design. "There is a clear line connecting that project all the way back to
Delirious New York," says architect Mark Schendel ofStudio/Gang Architects, who, along his
partner Jeanne Gang worked with Koolhaas at projects like the Grand Palais at Lille.
In 1978's Delirious New York, Koolhaas studied how the
programs of the
38-story Downtown Athletic Club subverted the usual
uniformity of the
blank-faced tower to become the "apotheosis of the
Skyscraper as instrument of the Culture of Congestion."
The Club harbours a sometime surreal collection of
activities - squash courts, a swimming pool, a colonic
center, an indoor golf course - united only by the
circulatory core of 13 elevators that unite and feed all the
floors. The 9th combines a room full of punching bags
with an oyster bar. "Eating oysters with boxing gloves,
naked," says Koolhaas, " such is the 'plot' of the ninth
story, or, the 20th century in action."
Koolhaas sees the Athletic Club as "an incubator for adults," the inhabitants transforming
themselves into new beings, this time according to their individual designs. Also, to be sure, an
expression of class, of "segregation of mankind into two tribes."
The second tribe, the non-elite tribe to which most of belong,
inhabits a far more constricted world, marked, says Schendel,
by the dominance of the horizontal, the single plane that we
all move around on." The mall, the superhighway, the infinite
horizon of suburban sprawl, are the hallmarks of modern life.
Even the traditional skyscraper is little more an endless - and
endlessly generic - horizontal plane, chopped into sections
that are stacked one atop the other.
Mies's hubris was to create the perfection of "an architecture
that anyone can do," and a concept of universal space that
would be enabling because it could be adapted to serve any
human purpose. What sped the acceptance of his architecture
within a market-driven economy, however, was its capacity
to standardize efficiencies that could limit possibilities and
flatten human experience to what was predictable and
controllable.
Koolhaas's hubris takes a very different form, that of creating single buildings that encapsulate
the "culture of congestion" by breaking free from the generically modular nature of most modern
architecture. .An entry in a 1989 competition for a Grand Bibliotheque in Paris included a spiral
of reading rooms, scooped out of an enormous cube of floors and floors of bookstacks. By the

time of a competition for still another Paris library just four years later, the entire building
became a continuous spiral, "a warped interior boulevard that exposes and relates all
programmatic elements." The visitor strolls along the boulevard, and "becomes a Baudelairean
flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information - by the urban
scenario."
Koolhaas found Seattle a very receptive breeding ground for his ideas. "It's a very specific
culture here," says Koolhaas. "There is a very
highly developed
common sensibility and a highly developed
sense of solidarity between
the rich and the poor. I think it's the only part
of America where the rich are angst-ridden
and want to do good. It is also a culture
where many people have been involved in the
digital world. What connects everyone is a
dedication to reason and to reasoning, and I
think that enabled us to do the project and
explains the way it turned out."
For me,says Koolhaas, it is a building that
is at the same time old-fashioned in terms of
resurrecting the public (realm), and
contemporary in terms of addressing the key issue whether the book is still relevant."

The library is eleven stories tall. What was fascinating,

explains Koolhaas, is that when we came back and started
looking at the program, (we divided) it into only into two
cavities - those elements and programmatic components that
we assumed would remain stable over time, and those where
we assumed they would start to mutate and change their
character fairly quickly. The stable programs are set within a
series of five stacked and staggered boxes, each with its own,
separate mechanical system, that include below-grade
parking, a ground-level entrance floor with an auditorium and
children's library, a floor of meeting rooms, a four-story book
stack, and a penthouse of administrative offices. On the roofs
of the boxes are open floors, all with clear current functions,
but ready to mutate for meet future needs.
Wrapped around everything - and separate from the primary
structure holding up the building - is a continuous
fabric of steel with inset four-by-seven-foot
diamond-shaped windows that is actually a second
structure, providing additional bracing against
earthquakes and wind. The glass, itself, has a mesh
interlayer that lets in light while controlling glare
and heat.
In Seattle, the straight geometric cube of the
previous Paris projects is sliced and diced to
envelop the projections of the various boxes,
creating a complex form of indentations and
overhangs, with sections that are diagonal as well as vertical and horizontal. The reflections of
cars in the street race along the facets, just line in the Saul Bass title sequence for
Hitchcock's North by Northwest. The glassy exterior shimmers like a jewelbox. Its varied
volumes, even in their massive, diamond-gridded linearity, evoke a cool modernism that's
somehow also richly voluptuous.
The building takes up a full city block. It's set
into a hill so what's a basement along 5th
avenue becomes a street-level entrance on
4th. To the right of the 5th avenue entrance is
a grand staircase that's been transformed into
an open, 275-seat auditorium, seats set on its
treads, and its side aisles forming a stairway
descending down to the 4th avenue entrance
floor.
The 5th avenue entrance level contains the
grandest of the library's great spaces. A

living room at the scale of the city,." is how

Koolhaas describes it. Its reception area has a large
flat monitor display with male and female virtual
guides that greet you; the same guides pop up on
video screens throughout the library. To the right is
a coffee cart where homeless teens train to be
baristas, and a gift shop that's mounted on tracks to
allow its five components to fold up into a solid
box after hours. To the left is a spacious reading
room, over which the steel diamond facade soars,
flooding the space with light. A teen center offers
two sound domes where listeners will be able to
blast music at ear-splitting volumes without
disturbing other patrons.
The books are placed along a book spiral, a continuous
four-story ramp. Joshua Ramus calls it probably the most
unique element of this building. He compares the process of
finding books in a conventional library to being led along a
trail of tears. You're handed the Dewey decimal system,
which is already obtuse to all of us, and the next step is that
the building doesn't even support that very obtuse
classification system. Our aim was to create a system for
physical organiza- tion that matched the organization of the
Dewey. At the bottom of the spiral is 000; the top of the
spiral is 999. Markings on aisle floors indicate the dewey
number of the books in the adjacent stacks. Indicators in the
elevators show the Dewey numbers covered on each of the
four floors. It's always directly obvious to the patron how to
find the books, says Ramus.
There's enough room to double the current holdings of
around 750,000 books, The spiral is brightly lit and the
stacks have a
sense of openness and space.
Koolhaas says the spiral system encourages people
"to browse through the entire trajectory, so that
you don't always move with a particular aim.
Ramus adds, There was a study done that made
the claim that something like 70 percent of all
positive hits in a library were actually through
serendipity-people do not take out what they came
to the library to look for in the first place. You can
now browse the entire collection, and you're not
shunted into a small fiefdom in the control of a
single librarian.

Normally stationed throughout the collection, librarians

here work together in an open 19,500 square foot floor
that Koolhaas has named the mixing chamber, a great
tall space with an aluminum floor and black columns
whose spray-on insulation includes a mica chip glitter.
Different areas of the library have different acoustics. As
opposed to the reading room, where the intent was to
dampen sound, the mixing chamber has an aggressively
lively acoustic that seems to mirror its intense
interactivity.
In time, says Ramus, the reason you will want to
access a library like this will not necessarily be the
physical materials or even the technology but the ability to
curate information. Koolhaas describes the mixing
chamber as being based on the model of the trading floor,
where the librarians are the experts in a trading room of
information. Librarians who are specialists in a subject
will be able to offer what Ramus calls interdisciplinary
help," allowing patrons to refine their searches. The
chamber has 132 computers, and offers virtual reference
service via online chat. There's even a dumbwaiter to carry books between the spiral and the
mixing chamber.
Koolhaas has made the library a showplace for his love for strong colors and varied finishes.
Floors are made of bamboo, wood scraps, aluminum, and poured polyurethane in in bright hues in the children's library, it's a rubberized pink.
The library's circulatory systems-the stairways, escalators, and elevatorsare a almost neon chartreuse. The escalators, lit from within, seem to glow,
providing a pulsating visual anchor distinguishable even at farthest reaches
of the library. The escalator connecting the living room and mixing
chamber includes a Tony Oursler freak-you-out installation, "Commu" that
projects videos of heads, eyes, mouths, and ears onto soft, egg-shaped
screens. (To view it, click here and then click on Works, then on Recent,
then on Seattle Public Library, and finally on the "Watch the Videos" link
on the page that then appears. Another Oursler piece, "Guilty" is at
the Museum of Contemporary Art.) It's a good reminder of
the library's role is not just to soothe, but to provoke..
On the interior, the steel of the diamond facade is painted
robin's egg blue. The meeting-room level has corridors with
amorphously shaped walls in shades of deep red and purple;
walking along it is like walking through a ventricle.. The polyurethane foam seats
in the auditorium are lime green. The curtain, a grassy print on one side, and a

warm cream with green pleats on the reverse, is by longtime Koolhaas collaborator and
companion Petra Blaisse. Her firm is called Inside/Outside, which is fitting, since she brings the
landscaping she designed for outside the library into the building as giant photos of plants
printed on carpets that are each a different hyperintense two-tone green, maroon, blue, red, or
purple.
Questions remain: Will librarians reallywant to work so closely together? Will users really be
able to take advantage of their expertise? Will the Rube Goldberg stretch of conveyor belts that
feed the automated checkout system (RFID based) be able to resist breaking down?
A few glitches have already been noted. Koolhaas was visibly perturbed when an escalator
ground to a halt under the weight of the mob following him on
a press tour, and the dimmed lighting in the mixing chamber
made it seem uninviting. "How do we get more light here?" he
implored into his cell phone. "It's crazy." The glossy floors in
the elevators easily show scuffs, and older eyes will probably
find the LEDs displaying floor information all but impossible
to read
in the glaring light of the cabs. The book spiral has already
revealed an unanticipated affinity to a roach motel. Patrons are
easily finding their way in through the up-only escalators, but
are having a hard time finding their way out. Chartreuse signs
have been taped up with instructions.
More than 25,000 people passed through the library on its
opening day, May 23, and media reports indicated most were
both awed and delighted. One can imagine them as atoms
bouncing against one another, cross-pollinating even as they
morph into their new selves, creating the kinds of creative interactions that are an article of faith
for Koolhaas, who believes that if you create buildings that encourage such contacts, good things
will result.
That rush of activity will probably remain the norm for the foreseeable future. Most patrons will
experience their new library loudly buzzing with activity, yet Koolhaas's and Ramus's
achievement may actually best be appreciated on a slow day.

Sitting in the far corner of the tenth-floor

grand reading room, atop Blaisse's
deep-hued floral carpet, you see the sweeping
wall of diamond windows
rise at a soothing 45-degree angle to a height
of 40 feet, to the top of the administration
box, whose walls overlooking the reading

room are covered in square white pillows that

muffle sound even as they remind you of a
pasha's harem. The pillows continue along
the ceiling underneath the box, from which
simple square white columns descend to the
floor. At points where the diamonds of the
steel frame window wall are subtly doubled
to strengthen the load, reinforcing columns slope to the floor, where they're encircled by low,
almost comically gentle steel railings. In the middle distance the happy chartreuse splash of the
grand staircase and escalator leads down to the book spiral; while farther off elevators glide
noiselessly up and down in their glass and concrete wrappers.
The rap on modernism is that it comes in just two flavors-the cold perfection of Mies or a
cacophonous experimentalism that often seems more about fashion than architecture. The Seattle
Public Library points to a third way, a new maturity.
As you take in all the funky shapes and angles and textures and colors, the
look-at-me bravado suddenly dissolves, and you become aware of how deeply harmonious these
spaces are, how they both nurture and resolve the contentious multiplicities of modern life.
You're blindsided by unexpected emotion, enveloped in a profound sense of harmony that's only
supposed to be found in the likes of a Greek temple (also brightly painted in its original
incarnation), or a Gothic cathedral. This is a place of grace.
Sleekness in Seattle - the new Seattle Public Library, by OMA,
Rem Koolhaas, Joshua Ramus - navigation:

http://www.lynnbecker.com/repeat/seattle/seattlepl.htm