This Is Not Your Mother’s Library

The public realm is under siege. Co-opted by corporate interests, smothered in advertising, its function as a civic forum is fading fast. Can architecture slow its deterioration? Or can it only express existing conditions?

The recently completed design for the new downtown Seattle Public Library, scheduled to open in 2003, is a project that tries to do both. It may be as close as an architect has come to capturing such broad urban tensions in one building.

Designed by Rem Koolhaas, the library is an audacious reworking of the conventional library, that archaic monument to civic glory. Koolhaas was hired in April 1999, over the New York architect Steven Holl and the Portland, Ore.-based Zimmer Gunsul Frasca. The choice seemed natural: The Dutch architect is known both for his ability to address rapid-fire technological changes and for his obsession with reinventing the contemporary metropolis. Scheduled to break ground next summer, the $156-million project will include a wide range of public reading rooms, a projected collection of 1.4 million volumes and an array of new information technology.

The design signals a gradual shift in Koolhaas’ work. His earlier projects were often sly critiques of the utopian vision of classical Modernism. The Seattle library’s shimmering copper-and-glass skin and brutal asymetrical forms--which rise 190 feet into the air--are the product of a mind increasingly bent on exposing difficult truths about the forces that are reshaping society. Raw and uncompromising, its beauty stems from Koolhaas’ ability to transform those truths into a safe house for the free exchange of information.

Koolhaas has now designed three libraries, but the simple geometric forms of the earlier projects--neither of them built--have a conceptual straightforwardness that he has since abandoned. The first, a 1989 competition entry for Paris’ Tres Grande Bibliotheque, was conceived as a 22-story glass cube of information, with enormous, amoeba-like public zones carved out of its core. Koolhaas once likened it to multiple “embryos” floating in a field of memory. Widely regarded as a landmark of contemporary design, it helped launch the architect’s international reputation.

Four years later, Koolhaas won a competition for the Jussieu Library at the University of Paris. The library is organized along a series of massive street-like ramps, as if the city’s energy had invaded the tranquil world of academia. It was a powerful image, and it also echoed a recurring theme in all of Koolhaas’ early work: the collision of scale--from private sanctuaries to massive urban infrastructure--that is a key feature of the modern metropolis.

But in the last few years, Koolhaas has dumped such poetic images in favor of a more hard-edged realism--one where the needs and desires of often competing interests are in a state of constant friction. An unbuilt 1997 design for a new Universal Studios headquarters building in Los Angeles, for instance, at first resembles a conventional office tower turned on its side. In fact, the corporate headquarters has been aggressively reconfigured. The building’s severe main facade, which faces the Hollywood freeway, steps in and out in vertical rows, slyly providing a glut of executive corner offices. The creative types are housed in generic, free-flowing office spaces in back, overlooking Universal’s studios. The office of Edgar Bronfman Jr., chief executive of Universal’s parent, Seagram Co., juts out from one end of the building, balanced on one slim column.

The building’s split personality recalls Louis Le Vau’s design for Vaux-le-Vicomte, the 17th century palatial estate of Nicolas Fouquet, Louis XIV’s finance minister. There, a humble front entry masks a more grandiose scheme in back--a metaphor for Fouquet’s role in Louis XIV’s court, suggesting that he was the monarchy’s true master, hidden behind a mask of servitude. (Louis got the metaphor and promptly jailed his minister.) At Universal, creativity is the hidden force behind a facade of executive vanity. What Koolhaas has done is lay bare the inner workings of the studio.

In Seattle, that kind of analysis gets ratcheted up several notches. More sculptural in form than anything Koolhaas has yet designed, the library is a physical expression of the struggle to both maintain the sanctity of public space and build an efficient technological machine in a world that is in a constant state of flux.

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Set on a steeply sloping site between 4th and 5th streets in Seattle’s downtown, the library is divided into eight horizontal layers, each varying in size to fit its function. Staff offices, meeting rooms and book stacks are each enclosed in rectangular concrete slabs, with the public spaces slotted between them.

Those layers are enclosed inside a membrane of crisscrossing copper mullions and glass, with the form folding back and forth as it rises to accommodate the varying sizes and positions of the layers inside. The cage-like exterior allows light to spill into the structure, but it also evokes a protective skin, as if the library were a fortress braced against the social instability outside, or maybe the corporate interests that continue to gobble up our public spaces--think CityWalk, a private mall disguised as a public street, or murals in urban parks that become promotional tools for corporations such as Nike.

Those tensions reappear inside, where visitors travel up through the hulking building and its study, research, and social areas. From the main entry on 4th Street, for instance, rows of escalators climb through the one-story slab of the staff offices before reaching a second lobby along 5th Street. The dual entries present two opposing faces of the city.

From 4th Street--one of the city’s main thoroughfares--you enter a slightly off-balance world, a pocket of urban density and cultural frictions. Along one side, the floor slopes down to the children’s reading room, crisscrossed by a series of ramps. Columns are slightly skewed, as if barely able to support the slab above.

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Facing 5th Street, the “Living Room” lobby--a casual public space--is more tranquil, overlooking the federal courthouse lawn. Here, towering walls of glass--framed by the shimmering copper mullions--embrace you on all sides, while the slab that houses the study rooms hovers overhead to one side.

The library’s intellectual heart is the “Mixing Chamber,” two levels above. Modeled after a stock exchange floor, the chamber will be stocked with interdisciplinary reference librarians to provide general information about resources and subjects. In effect, it is the place where information is traded. The slab of the study rooms below, which will eventually contain interactive research systems, and the book stacks, which begin one level up, act as a massive vise around this space, suggesting a precarious middle ground between the new, virtual world of information and the archaic world of books.

The stacks, arranged along a continuous spiral ramp contained with the four-story slab, reinforce a sense of a world organized with machine-like precision. The ramp allows people to browse through books in a smooth, unbroken sequence. But the slab also serves a symbolic function, evoking a vault for the preservation of the mythical value of the book, or a tomb for its eventual demise.

Koolhaas’ belief that architecture must learn to cope with multiple--often conflicting--realities may stem, in part, from his obsession with the Third World metropolis. He claims his first contact with a major city was on a childhood trip to Jakarta, Indonesia, with his father. The level of suffering was so overwhelming that, in his words, it destroyed the capacity for compassion. More recently, he has traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, to study the markets and shelters that have grown up in the city’s barren parks and underneath its decrepit freeways. Such experiences taught him to look at the world with a calculating eye. Rather than fight the forces around you, man must creatively adapt to them.

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But Koolhaas’ design can also be read as a challenge to the recent work of Frank Gehry, the Los Angeles architect whose Experience Music Project museum opened here last month. The flowing, colorful forms of Gehry’s building emerge from a confident belief that an architect can contribute to a culture’s vibrancy by creating works of stunning beauty. It is the nature of that beauty--rooted in the democratic values of everyday life rather than the elitism of high art--that Gehry has reinvented.

By contrast, Koolhaas’ design seems to reject all conventional notions of beauty. The library’s distorted exterior forms and hyper-functional interior ignore traditional ideals of compositional balance, proportion and scale. They are an expression, instead, of the the clashing economic and social systems that shape us. To Koolhaas, architecture begins with the acceptance of those systems; only then can it effectively reshape them.

As for those who equate Koolhaas’ hard-edged realism with a new kind of nihilism, they miss the point. What prevents Koolhaas’ design from tumbling into cynicism is not only its remarkable analytic clarity, but its ability to transform that analysis into a new kind of civic landscape--one where public space is broken down into discrete, interrelated zones, each with its own value. The more you contemplate Koolhaas’ vision, the more optimistic it becomes. In effect, the building is a testament to human adaptability.