Everyone makes jokes about Rem Koolhaas’ name, so I thought I’d keep the title of this post simple. This is the first time I had actually been in one of the Dutch architect’s buildings and I was blown away. The pictures do not even remotely do it justice. As you can see, I loved his use of color. Who knows if we will even go to the library in our online future, but I have spent so much of my life in the institutions, I don’t want to see them go. I am glad to see someone reconceive it, even if the ubiquity of computers makes you think you’ve awakened in Capek’s RUR.
UPDATE: Of course, I will admit that old fashioned libraries, like this one in Prague may be yet more amazing.
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26 Comments
1. TigerHawk:Those are some beautiful pictures. I do not follow architecture intensively, but your pictures capture a very cool building.
Dec 31, 2004 - 2:26 pm 2. Word Guy:Jokes? Oh, aha. You might call that a “cool-ass” building. Wocka. Koolhaas means something like cabbage-hare in Dutch. (Or, alternately, coal rabbit, which makes even less sense…)
Dec 31, 2004 - 2:37 pm 3. Terrye:Beautful, I have never seen it but maybe someday I will get there.
I can not imagine life without libraries.
Dec 31, 2004 - 2:38 pm 4. chuck:I still don’t like it. It is very dramatic, sort of the Lawrence of Arabia of Libraries, but I don’t feel the warmth and intimacy I like to have around books. More a showy space than an inhabitable space. I hear echos just looking at it.
The big question, of course, is how many restrooms there are. Water fountain density also gets high points. Any comfortable chairs? Are there lovely stacks smelling of paper, or is it all very hygenic and open?
Well, if I ever get to Seattle I will just have to go and see.
Dec 31, 2004 - 2:56 pm 5. lindenen:One day this will ba a fancy dance club. I know it.
Dec 31, 2004 - 3:20 pm 6. Vexorg:I posted a few of my thoughts from a visit I made back in June, about a week after it opened:
Link
Dec 31, 2004 - 3:24 pm 7. Vexorg:Gah, one of these days I’ll figure out how to get those things to work. The post is linked on my name.
Dec 31, 2004 - 3:26 pm 8. Catherine:It’s incredible!
I love it!
Happy New Year, everyone!
Dec 31, 2004 - 3:35 pm 9. richard mcenroe:I’d feel better about it if someone in Seattle could spell “Library” (Libe? Is that short for “Liberry?”)…
And if we’re doing R.U.R. references, have you seen the 1935 MGM musical version? R.U.R. or R.U. Ain’t My Baby…
Dec 31, 2004 - 4:06 pm 10. chuck:LOL, richard.
Dec 31, 2004 - 4:15 pm 11. Roger:Richard,
That’s Libé, the French version, as in the newspaper.
Dec 31, 2004 - 4:26 pm 12. richard mcenroe:Suuuuure, Roger; I always knew that “gentleman’s C” in English would catch up with you some day…
Dec 31, 2004 - 5:10 pm 13. Michael J. Totten:Roger, you and I may agree on a lot of things, but architecture just isn’t one of them. I want a library that looks like the Louvre. Now that’s a nice building!
Dec 31, 2004 - 5:20 pm 14. thibaud:My opinion: Yick.
Libraries are background: discreet servants, secondary to the main course and the scintillating conversation of the lord and lady and their dinner guests. If you spend a lot of time focused on the R.E.M Kool Haus pyrotechnics, then you’re not focused on Shakespeare Montaigne Dante Tolstoy Dostoevsky Flaubert Conrad and the other denizens of a library. Wouldn’t it make more sense just to head off to a club or a bar?
Dec 31, 2004 - 9:46 pm 15. Saint Albatross:I live three blocks up the hill from this monstrosity. Here’s just a sample of my feelings about the new library -
Why spend 268 million on a building so obtusely meant to be seen if you can’t even see it? From what you can see (across the street), it’s a travesty of angles. But since it is impossible to view from any distance, it is impossible to judge as a whole. Spend 268 million dollars on a building one can see when one enters the bay, or comes across on the ferry, or whatever … but not on something hidden by high-rise office space. Whatever unlikely virtue it might have in being seen is lost cause ya can’t see it.
Nor can you see from it. In spite of all the glass, it is impossible to see out of the thing; even stranger, in spite of all the glass the light fails to be natural. Everything lendsto a general feeling of labyrinthine blindness.
Why spend 268 million on a library with no books? Here’s an idea, spend 168 million on a nice, serviceable and humbly beautiful building; maybe something in some way tied to the culture and history of the city. Then spend the saved 100 million updating your sad collection* (my wife recently waited three weeks for a single copy of Mansfield Park. Jane-freakin-Austin: three weeks for the library to get it to you.) I know the collection they have does lie within the belly of the thing – but I only know it because I endured the maze long enough to discover it. All these strange, vacuous, angular but open spaces, and the books are hidden in a tight winding organ that has surely already proven fatal to claustrophobics.
You could also spend part of that 100 million paying your librarians, who have several times recently been forced to take unpaid vacations due to budget shortfalls.
Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.
I hate the thing. It is emblematic of everything that has changed for the worse in this city over the last 15 years. Give me some balance and some symmetry, and some human space. Take this shroom inspired neo-space-age day-glo nightmare and plop it down somewhere fitting, like Century City.
* The King County Library System has a far better collection than SPL – but since we don’t like to drive (may never find a another parking place) we rarely get out to a branch.
~
Jan 1, 2005 - 1:55 am 16. Lola:I’m sorry, but I would have to add my “yuck” to the chorus. I’ll admit that I’m not a big fan of modern art. These just don’t make any sense to me at all. I know some people like, even create it, but it just doesn’t appeal to my senses. I’ll grant it that the roofline in the computer room is interesting, though.
Jan 1, 2005 - 5:22 am 17. Fausta:My favorite library is Abbey Library of St.Gall. Glorious use of space, fitting the books around a beautiful room grounded in a magnificent inlaid floor and topped by a heavenly ceiling.
Jan 1, 2005 - 5:46 am 18. Macker:Roger…I would be safe to say that the colors are definitely blatant! Is that Madeline in the last picture dancing around? If so, SHE must like the colors, right?
Jan 1, 2005 - 7:12 am 19. chuck:Saint Albatross :
If I may summarize your post: overpriced, dysfunctional, architectural sadism. Hmmm, sounds like “modern” architecture all right.
It will be interesting to see how the building looks in ten years. I’m betting on leaks and high maintainence costs, leading to an overall shabby, rundown look.
Jan 1, 2005 - 8:08 am 20. olivia:Dysfunctional is a good word for it : slow elevators, restrooms hidden away on odd levels, aisles only wide enough for ONE person, pathetic collection (they have to send out to other libraries for Jane Austen), etc..
All the photos I’ve seen of the library make it look much nicer than it actually is. You never get that ice-cold retro superfuture Ikea feeling when you’re actually IN the building; it’s more like a depressing Stalinist warehouse. It’s symptomatic of what’s wrong with Seattlites — it’s ugly, cold, and soulless.
I understand the reasoning behind the idea of the Central Library. The library should be for the Masses, a resource and meeting place for All. To that end, they don’t want to make the place too intimidating; they don’t want the library to be a place of elite learning, symbolic of all that was ever wrong with Western Civilization. So they make the same mistake that any self-righteous, condescending elitist has always made when creating something for the “little people,” of underestimating humanity. They end up getting everything absolutely wrong. A library SHOULD be grand, SHOULD be imposing. When I walk up its steps and through its great solid doors, I should feel as if I’m entering a cathedral. A world of knowledge, symbolic of that ideal greatness of man, of the striving for something bigger and better than what we are. I want to be overwhelmed with beauty and history and become excited about the possibilities of the future.
What we have instead is possibly the world’s most expensive homeless shelter.
Jan 1, 2005 - 9:56 am 21. Catherine:OK, reading through this thread I am losing some enthusiasm—–but I STILL LOVE THE COLORS!
(The photos I saw of the outside do strike me as ghastly, I must say. Still: bright red and bright green & bright-everything are, as far as I’m concerned, Antidepressants In Paint. Which is a good thing.)
Roger!
Remember the library at Dartmouth????
The Orozco mural in the basement reserve room????
OK, Sports Fans, if you want to see something that REALLY has no place in a library, check out the Orozco mural. I used to sit in the basement and stare at the panel titled, as I recall, “The Birth of Sterile Knowledge,” and think: Why?
The Birth of Sterile Knowledge panel was a painting of a woman skeleton, attended by professors wearing long black robes, literally giving birth, from between her legs, to dead knowledge, which was pictured as little baby dead things (can’t remember if they were dead babies or dead baby skeletons) inside sealed plastic capsules.
We were supposed to do our reserve reading in front of this thing.
You can get a sense of it here:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/Orozco/part2.html
Jan 1, 2005 - 10:59 am 22. richard mcenroe:In related architectural news, and I couldn’t be making this up, the director of the Pompidou Center in Paris has announced they intend to establish branches in third-world nations as an affirmation of European culture.
Because, you know, the third-world has not idea what ugly exposed plumbing looks like…
Jan 1, 2005 - 10:59 am 23. chuck:What we have instead is possibly the world’s most expensive homeless shelter.
So, a bus station.
Jan 1, 2005 - 11:03 am 24. Catherine:Gods of the Modern World
In the basement of Dartmouth’s library.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/Orozco/panel17.html
Jan 1, 2005 - 11:38 am 25. chuck:Catherine,
Thanks for the link. Looking thru the other panels was like studying the relics of a pagan cult whose time had passed.
Jan 1, 2005 - 11:57 am 26. Charlie (Colorado):Because, you know, the third-world has not idea what ugly exposed plumbing looks like…
Hey!
I love the Pompidou!
Jan 1, 2005 - 2:19 pm