Intro | Chicago 1988 | Seattle 1999 | The New Seattle Public Library | ||||
Sleekness in Seattle- by Lynn Becker Rem
Koolhaas, Joshua Ramus, OMA and the
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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 of Studio/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 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 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. 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. 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 really want 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 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 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.
Intro | Chicago 1988 | | Seattle 1999 | The new Seattle Public Library
© Copyright 2003-2006 Lynn Becker All rights reserved.
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