[Publib] My visit to Seattle Public Library, July 31

[Joe Schallan]

Last year I posted at length about the Rem Koolhaas-designed Central  
Library of the Seattle Public Library System. As Publibbers may  
recall, after I had read numerous newspaper and magazine articles and  
blog posts about the building, and viewed hundreds of photos in  
photostreams on Flickr and elsewhere, I came away with a negative  
impression:  There seemed to be severe navigation problems, bizarre  
and inefficient use of space, and an inhumane, brutal feeling to the  
project.  I concluded that it looked like a case of a hip, postmodern  
architect run amok, allowed to create a structure more about himself  
and about philosophical points he wished to score than about library  
service.

I ended my musings with the caveat that I needed to personally visit  
the building, not just do the sort of at-arm's-length, virtual tour  
that digital media now permit.

On Tuesday morning this week, in the company of librarian/ 
photographer (and spouse) Linda Schallan, I made that in-person visit.

We were on our way home from two weeks on Vancouver Island and its  
satellite islands, in British Columbia.  (A note to Sue Kamm and  
other baseball fans on the list:  I was also able to attend a  
Mariners-Angels game Monday night at Seattle's Safeco Field.  Vlad  
Guerrero greviously disappointed me.  Contact me off list for more  
details.)

British Columbia's motto is "Splendor Sine Occasu," which translates  
roughly as "splendor without diminishment," and I can attest to the  
veracity of this boast. For natural beauty, British Columbia will  
have few rivals. Our particular trip took us to the little Pacific  
coast town of Tofino, among the spectacular inlets of Vancouver  
Island's Pacific-Ocean-facing rainforest coast, to the Southern Gulf  
Islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland, and to the  
provincial capital, Victoria, where we discovered that the librarians  
of the City of Vancouver had just gone out on strike and that the  
library workers of Greater Victoria had just voted to do same. The  
library workplaces in the cities of the province seem to be highly  
unionized.  Better treatment for paraprofessional staff seemed to be  
one of several issues at the heart of the strike actions.

Linda and I were charmed by it all, but especially by Galiano Island,  
where one evening we strolled a nature trail through an old-growth  
Western Red Cedar and Douglas Fir forest and had an up-close  
encounter with a very large owl and a family of beavers.  When we  
left Phoenix, we were sweltering through another 113-degree- 
Fahrenheit day, whereas during our entire two-week stay in B.C. we  
had a hottest day of only 75. I came home to my library only with the  
greatest of reluctance, and am slowly and grudgingly readjusting to  
Fahrenheit instead of the eminently sensible Celsius, miles instead  
of kilometres, and drab green money instead of loonies, twonies, and  
colorful bills with hockey players or the Queen on them.

Splendor sine occasu.  Indeed!  And among the splendors are the  
Canadians themselves.  They are stereotypically portrayed as being  
far too "nice" -- there was even a column in the Canadian National  
Post about the need to get edgier, grumpier, and angrier so as to  
achieve emotional parity with the U.S. -- but the fact is that they  
are . . . well, very nice indeed. Even the R.C.M.P. (Royal Canadian  
Mounted Police) officer who nailed me for going 110 kph through the  
80 kph zone in the Pacific Rim National Park was extraordinarily nice  
about it, letting me off with a warning and politely requesting that  
I not barrel through their national parks so fast.

Back to Seattle.

Given my research last year, I was fully prepared to dislike the  
building. The photos of the exterior and interior I had seen gave the  
impression of a vast, impersonal, brutal structure.  It does indeed  
look like some sort of immense steel-and-glass origami squatting on a  
full city block, but I was surprised at how good I felt when I walked  
in.  All the glass lets sunlight filter in and gives the impression  
of entering a greenhouse. Admitting all the light one can in Seattle  
-- where in the winter it can be gray and overcast for weeks on end  
-- is important. The light and airiness were a pleasing surprise.

If there is anything on the building's exterior to indicate that it  
is the public library, I didn't see it.  I guess it is assumed that  
you will know what this building is, and given the publicity it has  
generated, there are probably few Seattlites who do not know about  
it. Rem Koolhaas seems to have loathed signage.  All I saw were hours  
of operation for whatever it is that is going on inside.  Perhaps I  
walked right by a big "Seattle Public Library" sign. We entered from  
Fourth Avenue.

On the sidewalk in front of the main entrance there is, however and  
rather incongruously, a large sculpture of a pink pig with two fried  
eggs on its back.  Linda took a photo of me with it.

Many of the articles I consulted last year noted navigation problems  
inside the building.  If anything, these writers *understated* the  
magnitude of the problem -- there is no central core of stairs and  
elevators.  Instead, escalators and stairs are scattered about  
randomly. Some of these arbitrarily skip floors; others are one-way  
only.  Although there are elevators serving all 11 floors, these are  
hidden away over in one corner of the building.  When you walk in,  
there is a bank of elevators -- maybe the same ones that are hidden  
away elsewhere -- but no other obvious way to get up higher into the  
structure. This is probably why SPL has a volunteer stationed at an  
ugly, built-in-somebody's-garage podium, who seems to be there solely  
to provide navigational assistance. The elevators are cryptically  
labelled with destinations such as "living room" and "mixing  
chamber."  If you want to know where reference or the public  
computers are, you're going to need the help of the volunteer.

The living room, btw, is where one finds fiction, new books, the teen  
center, and the coffee shop. And the mixing chamber is the location  
of reference and the public computers.

The book spiral contains nonfiction and covers the sixth through  
ninth floors.  It does indeed spiral up -- like the spiral in the  
Guggenheim Museum in New York -- and you sense the gentle slope as  
you ascend. It is all concrete and gray steel, and fairly narrow  
aisles, starting with 000 on the sixth floor and ending with 999 and  
biographies on the ninth. The floor of the spiral contains black  
rubber-tile insets that give the range numbers. The tiles are set in  
but not adhesively attached -- you can pick them up and rearrange  
them. The pranking 12-year-old boys of Seattle do not seem to have  
discovered this possibility yet.

I rode the now famous (or notorious) fluorescent-green escalator from  
the mixing chamber up through the book spiral to the reading room on  
the tenth floor. There is a spot where it passes through the seventh  
floor at which you can bail off into the spiral. This escalator is  
one-way only and it deposits you at the top of the building with no  
obvious way down. Staff has responded with taped-up laser-printed  
signs directing you to a tiny and obscure stairwell. Temporary  
signage directing you to the elevators over in the corner of the  
building has also been installed.

Somewhere I have read an architectural critic who maintained that  
when staff members feel compelled to stick up laser-printed signs all  
over the place, then the building they are working in has failed.

Above the reading room on the 10th floor is a well-hidden 11th floor  
where the gods of library administration dwell. You can interpret the  
symbolism of the escalator NOT penetrating this space in any manner  
you wish. Access, as near as I can tell, is only by the hidden  
elevators, though in this building, who knows for sure?

The ceiling and walls of the reading room have a curious surface  
treatment -- soft, white-vinyl, chair-seat cushions have been used.   
Linda and I almost simultaneously exclaimed "padded cell!"

Another now notorious feature of the building is the suite of meeting  
rooms tucked between the living room and mixing chamber. The hallways  
are deep blood-red -- floors, walls, and ceiling -- and the  
lightbulbs are even red. It is *very* dark in there. One wag (not me)  
commented that it was like walking around inside somebody's colon.  
There was a laser-printed sign informing occupants that restrooms  
were available on various other floors.  How do you design meeting- 
room space without having restrooms nearby?

There are large structural-steel I-beams throughout the building that  
jut out of ceilings and into floors at odd angles, mostly 45 degrees  
or so. These are major head-bonking and tripping hazards, and most  
have little fences of once sort or another around them to forestall  
head bonking. I noticed that the base of one of the I-beams in the  
reading room had shoe polish on it from all the patrons who had  
snagged their feet there.

The children's library is quite accessible right off the main  
entrance on Fourth Avenue.  It is a very, very large and bright  
space, with lots of surface color.  It gave as favorable an initial  
impression as the wonderful greenhouse effect I experienced upon  
first walking into the building.

The library features a robotic (think industrial numerical control,  
not R2D2) book-sorting system.  There is a video display under a  
sonic dome in the circ area that shows how it works.  The short video  
depicts how books are sensed, oriented, and placed into correct order  
on carts.

One of the articles I read last year quoted architect Koolhaas as  
maintaining that "public space is dead" and that in his buildings he  
wanted to convey a sense of disorientation and alienation, since that  
is the contemporary urban experience.  In terms of the *severe*  
navigation problems his Seattle library presents, he has succeeded  
according to his own terms.  But also, either through intention or in  
spite of it, he has created a space that is, at its best, wonderfully  
filled with light and air, and that pulls the surrounding geography  
of downtown Seattle into the building rather than walling it off.

The ultimate question in assessing this building is, Does it serve  
Koolhaas or does it serve library patrons?

As an urban object, it has succeeded in at least the respect of being  
an attention-getter and tourist attraction.

I chatted for some time with a volunteer posted in the living room. I  
explained that Linda and I were librarians on vacation from Arizona,  
and she said they get a lot of librarians on vacation.  While she was  
extolling the building to me, a twentyish young man came up and  
interrupted us.  He loudly said "This building is anti-life . . . I  
HATE this building!"

The volunteer smiled sweetly and said to me that the building  
certainly elicits all kinds of strong reactions.

Linda took at least 100 photos outside and inside the building. Once  
we unwind a bit, get fully unpacked, and get back into the swing of  
things at our respective libraries, she'll edit the photos and I'll  
caption them and put them up on my Flickr photostream.  At which  
point I'll let Publib know.

-- Joe Schallan
     Phoenix
(who has yet to have had a vacation go by without visits to the  
libraries at wherever it is we are going . . . )