Another neighbor opines on...what else?...

The new Seattle Public Library

What specifically don't I like about it? From the outside, the pompous, looming approach on 4th, in which the entry has all the appeal of a pore. Seattle doesn't need to shade its streets, and the high overhang won't protect that door from much rain. (Next visit, I'll start on 5th and see if that feels better.) Then the navigation is hideously, hilariously bad, so that the librarians have already taped up (tidy and color-cordinated) copier notices explaining where to go and how to get out. There's all this whooptedo about the easy navigation and the spiral of books, but (postponing the question of whether the Dewey line is really how we access books) you don't walk in and meet the books, you walk into a sort of distant-concierge hotel lobby on 5th or a crowded industrial arrangement of dead ends on 4th. The lobby on 5th presents vast vertical space with no books. The children's and multilingual books are on floor 1; 2 isn't public; 3 is other fiction (all of it?); the spiral is floors 6 to 9. You don't get to see the spiral when you walk in (I didn't find a good overview of it anywhere). The building doesn't invite you into the knowledge of the ages, rather it does more to hide the books than I would have thought possible in an open-plan, glass-walled building.