[Publib] More on Koolhaas's library . . .

Thu Jan 4 07:51:51 EST 2007

I'm not a Seattle librarian, but I was living in the Seattle area while in library school and was able to take a behind-the-scenes tour of the library not too long after it opened, in December 2004.  I'm also a former City of Seattle employee, and I cringe at the amount of money spent on the architect for this impractical building.  Here are just a few observations:

  1)  There's a five-story escalator that goes to the top floor, but it only goes up.  The only ways back down are through the book spiral (nice for book lovers, but your average person is not gonna want to walk that far), in a couple small elevators, or taking the scary fire escape stairs.  I got lost inside the latter as the exit doors to various floors weren't clearly marked.

  2)  The children's room (at least back then), while huge, was all steel and glass walls, wood floors, and concrete ceilings.  No carpets or other materials to absorb the sound children inevitably make, even in a library.  A friend who was a newly-hired children's librarian there confirmed that it was a very noisy place to work.  In my opinion, not particularly inviting for most children either.

  3)  The fourth floor, which is the meeting room level, has hallways painted blood red.  It's very dark and foreboding.  I felt like a corpuscle moving through the chambers of a heart.

  4)  All the glass is nice on a sunny day, but in late December, when clouds and rain and short days are the norm, some more artificial lighting in the library would be nice.  I found it quite dark.

  Perhaps some of these situations have been addressed in the past couple years.  Here's a rather humorous article on the "killer library" published in one of Seattle's alternative newspapers shortly after the library opened:  
  http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=18407

  Expressing my own views here,

  Amanda Pape
  Special Services Librarian II
  Tarleton State University
  Stephenville, Texas

Joe Schallan <jbsphx at cox.net> wrote:
  . . . and the more I reflect on it and read
about it, the more it really does seem to
be the architect's library, not Seattle's.

The folks at the Project for Public Spaces
offer their take:

http://tinyurl.com/uho76

I was in Seattle in August 2004, not long
after the new library opened. I was on my
way to a performance at Seattle Opera and
did not have time to go in (which I SHOULD
do), but I did drive completely around the
structure twice. It is brutal. It is a great
pile of metal and glass mostly built
right up to the sidewalks, with great metallic
overhangs that seem poised to swat anything
so insignificant as a human being. It is
utterly isolated from the Downtown
in which it sits . . . or squats. It is cold,
uninviting, alienating, with nary a clue as
to how to get into the thing.

There have been reports of severe problems
with navigation of the building; LJ last year
ran a photo of laser-printed signs stuck up by
staff to reduce the bewilderment.

I was hoping a Seattle librarian on the list
would report. If you read the New Republic
article I cited in my previous posting, you'll
come away with the unsettling feeling that
Koolhaas's agenda is both anti-human and
and inhumane, though cloaked in fatuous
high-concept architect-speak.

He WANTS us to be uncomfortable, disoriented,
and alienated. In his Weltanschauung, these
things are the purposes of great architecture:
to provide a postmodern epiphany of personal
insignificance. Easily finding a copy of
Bartlett's is beside the point.

In short, the building is there not to help you
but to mug you.

Not that I have a strong opinion.

Which is why I would appreciate if those of you
lucky enough to be able to attend Midwinter
could go to downtown Seattle, look and judge
carefully, and report back to the list. After all,
I could be wrong.

It is important stuff. We are stuck with our
buildings for many, many years, whether they
work or not and, more important, so are our
patrons. We have been building public libraries
for going on 170 years (taking the one in
Peterborough, NH as starting point), and yet
each new main library seems to be an
exercise in inventing the wheel. You'd think
by now we'd have a syllabus of good practices,
of what we know works and what doesn't. That
we'd know exactly what makes a building
approachable, easy to navigate, easy to
reconfigure to new media, new technology, and
new demands, and easy to run and repair.

For my part, I'd like the library architect to be less
edgy artist and more engineer and ergonomicist.

For more on the new Seattle main, see also

"Eyesore of the Month":
http://www.kunstler.com/eyesore_200406.html

Scott Neilson's Photographic Walkthrough (many photos):
http://tinyurl.com/ycqguv
(I wonder how easy it will be to change those
Dewey numbers embedded in the floor when
it comes time to shift the collection.)

"The library field trip," on the City Comforts blog:
http://tinyurl.com/yzcn3r

"Brutal" Architecture, on Keith Pleas blog:
http://tinyurl.com/yf5umb
Quoting Rem Koolhaas -- "this is an uncomfortable
era in architecture"

-- Joe Schallan
Phoenix

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