By the time Rem Koolhaas heard about the competition to design the new Seattle Public Library, it was hardly a competition. A Seattle native, Steven Holl, who’d designed the splendid Saint Ignatius chapel on the Seattle University campus, already had the inside track. But chief librarian Deborah Jacobs and the members of the board were so wowed by the work done by Koolhaas’s firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, that the project was soon in the hands of Koolhaas and his partner Joshua Ramus.
The Mandel Building in fact remained the library’s home for 13 years, until 1988, when its owners decided to demolish it to make way for the new NBC Tower. The 4,700,000 items in the library’s collection were packed up and hauled to yet another temporary facility, a loft building behind the Merchandise Mart. Administrative offices were set up at 1224 W. Van Buren, almost two miles away.
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A second design competition was launched in 1987, and its rules almost guaranteed mediocrity. Most design competitions judge the quality of the designs submitted by architects. But the city, eager to end the embarrassment of having a perpetually temporary central library, committed itself to opening its replacement in 1991, less than three years away. In an attempt to ensure the job would be done on time and to avoid the kind of massive cost overruns it had seen at McCormick Place and O’Hare, it made the contractor, not the architect, the primary player. The usual result of such “design-build” projects is bargain-basement architecture, like the ugly condo towers that have risen in River North over the past several years. Quality of design was less important than building within the $140 million budget.
At the time architecture was still in the throes of postmodernism, which was less about creating a valid new architecture than about indulging an anything-but-Mies reaction to the profusion of knockoffs of his sleek glass towers. Skyscrapers were sprouting ironic versions of classical pediments and arcades–architecture based more on parodistic commentary than original thought. Beeby, the highly capable architect of the Sulzer Regional Library on North Lincoln and the new Harris Theater for Music and Dance in Millennium Park, presented a design that in some ways stripped postmodernism of its excesses. It was restrained to the point of torpor, its brick facades ponderous, its elegant glass curtain wall relegated to the side facing the alley. But the roofline design went a little nuts, with gargantuan owls that looked like they’d just flown in from a Batman movie. Contradictory and confusing, the library was a clear reflection of its time.
The Seattle library is 11 stories high and consists of five stacked and staggered enclosed boxes that house, according to Koolhaas, “those elements and programmatic components that we assumed would remain stable over time.” These 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 that can “mutate and change their character fairly quickly.” Wrapped around everything–separate from the primary structure holding up the building but serving as additional bracing against earthquakes and wind–is a continuous fabric of steel and inset four-by-seven-foot diamond-shaped windows. Its multiple planes make the exterior shimmer like a jewel box around the stunning interior spaces.
Librarians here all work together on an open floor that Koolhaas has named the “mixing chamber.” Ramus says, “In time, the reason you will want to access a library like this will not necessarily be the physical materials or even the technology but the ability to curate information.” Koolhaas describes the mixing chamber as being based “on the model of the trading floor, where the librarians are the experts in a trading room of information.” Librarians who are specialists in a subject will be able to offer what Ramus calls “interdisciplinary help,” allowing patrons to refine their searches. There’s even a dumbwaiter to carry books between the spiral and the mixing chamber.
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. As you take in all the funky shapes and angles and textures and colors, the look-at-me bravado suddenly dissolves, and you become aware of how deeply harmonious these spaces are, how they both nurture and resolve the contentious multiplicities of modern life. Like a Gothic cathedral or a Greek temple, the library has a grace that’s profoundly moving.
