The library field trip

Very pleasant and stimulating company; now off to a Wild Beach Party (that's the party, not the beach) for the rest of the weekend. Will try to post my thoughts on what I/we saw early next week.

UPDATE: Don't miss Scott Neilson's Downtown Seattle Public Library Walkthrough.

UPDATE 2: I can see that the difficulty is going to be to discipline myself to sit down and spend time with (by wrting) a building and architect that really don't interest me. I mean life is short and Scott Neilson's photos remind me that the Library is essentially a bore, a whole lot of OK corporate architecture dressed up in pretentious, obsurantist "design theory." I was reminded of nothing more than a the atrium of a Hyatt Hotel or the cold, hard, grand spaces of an airport; all very well and good but not the cozy, intimacy I like in a place where I want to sit down and focus my attention on a book. And not even remotely inspiring. Koolhaas' architecture reminds me in this instance of the saying that "marketing trumps talent, skill, inspiration and hard work."

Bottom line and I will get it out now before I systematically explain in a future post:
• the exterior --- about as bad as I 've seen by way of contributing to city life;
• the interior -- OK. Just OK. Nothing gross, nothing special. A few nice touches here and there. But mostly (if one knows the cost and hoopla surrounding the structure) a sad and overblown story.

One small anecdote -- and maybe some one out there can help me with further research -- but when I first looked into Koolhaas and his Office for Metrolpolitan Architecture (OMA) several years ago I discovered readily that OMA was a wholly-owned division of an enormous Dutch engineering firm....some group which appeared to me to be on the scale of a Bechtel, though I may have gotten that wrong. Needless to say I was surprised. Koolhaas and his firm present themselves as if they are some street guerrilla architects with a take on the world so fresh and radical that it could only exist at the margins of society. But actually a division of huge engineering firm? Well I have lost the URL to the engineering firm and the OMA site makes no mention (surprise!) of the parent. Anyone have any information? Thanks.

And now I get how OMA might very well exist within such an organization in a rain-making "look how artistic we are beneath our green-eyeshades" manner. The Library is corporate architecture at its most mediocre: Vain, expensive, pretentious and in some aspects very very stupid. More later. And don't miss Scott's photos.

UPDATE 3: David White's comment (below) sums it up nicely: the Library is not at all intuitive i.e. as a new user one does not sense naturally and comfortably how the building is organized. You know how it is in a restaurant? You can always know (if the place is designed typically) where to find the wash rooms? That's what I call intutive design -- there are enough queues and clues so that one knows how to use the space without ever having been there before. The Seattle Public Library is not, to my senses, like that at all.

UPDATE 4: Don't miss Matthew Amster-Burton's remarks on the field trip.

Comments

[Scott Neilson]

Yes, I enjoyed the library field trip (and your company) very much. I posted a little photo gallery containing 25 of the photos I took on Saturday.

http://www.attentivedesign.com/photo_galleries/Seattle_Public_Library/

[Francis Morrone]

I don't know about the wholly owned subsidiary thing, but even without that, David, isn't it amazing that a firm still presents itself as a radical, "guerrilla" firm when it commands billions and billions of dollars in commissions around the globe?

Muschamp likes to champion the architects he calls "non-normative." Yet every one of his "non-normative" architects is in the billion-dollar league. I mean, how "non-normative" can you be when your projects cost a billion dollars? For that matter, how "non-normative" can you be when your voice in the wilderness cries out from the pages of...The New York Times?

[David]

I love the handmade signs in a multi million dollar building. I have always believed that a public building is somehow a failure if something simple like finding the restroom is not fairly intuitive.

[Scott Neilson]

I agree with some of your criticism David. There is plenty wrong with our new piece of brand name architecture. There are the building’s shockingly bad circulation and wayfinding issues, the Gattaca-esque lack of connection with life outside the glass, the “confused suburban gawker collection area” at the bottom of the dead-end spiral, the hidden elevators, the agoraphobic nightmare of floor to ceiling glass hanging 3 stories in the air, the noisy metal stairs, oh yeah, and the crushing price tag.

However, despite ALL THAT, I find myself really LOVING our new library on an emotional level. I’m happy it’s here and I’m happy to chip in my annual $327-ish in taxes to have access to it. I think the exterior is a majestic hunk of crystallized 21st century capital amid Seattle’s timid pastiche of namby pamby provincial buildings. The spare modernity of the interior volumes, colors, textures and glorious light makes me feel cosmopolitan and somehow more enlightened than I really am. I appreciate how hushed most of the spaces are despite their large volumes of aluminum, concrete enameled steel and glass. I also appreciate the comfort of the chairs despite the fact that they cost us $600 a pop. Not to let Koolhaas off the hook for his blunders here but I think the design succeeds in fostering exploration and serendipity which, I believe, are as crucial to the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom than rigid, stopwatch and clipboard efficiency of access.

[David Sucher]

"Gattaca-esque?" That's way over my head.:) What is it?

Otherwise very interesting response, Scott.

Well I love libraries too and it's hard to be critical of one. Or rather, perhaps it is because I love libraries so much that I am ferocious and unyielding in my expectations and so vexed with aspects of this one. As to the appearance, one of the problems with "architectural criticism" which focusses on "how it looks" is that the matter is simply so subjective. I am indifferent to the basic shape and form; but it doesn't offend me or annoy me except that it takes away money from my neighborhood library etc etc. and everyone makes such a big deal about it, totally ignoring the fact that the structure is just another piece of suburban corporate architecture, or at least in that vernacular; it would do very well in Tyson's Corner.

Anyway, that's why I focus on how a building behaves as opposed to how it looks.

[Scott Neilson]

Ah, pardon my obscure cinema reference. Gattaca (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119177/) is a (brilliant IMHO) sci-fi film from 1997 featring sets that are crisp and terminally stylish but unnervingly austere. As one move buff put it: "...everything is washed in a pale golden light that first makes you think of utopia, but then you notice the clinically clean lines and surfaces, the movie is set in a cold emotionless place."

[clew]

About Koolhaas &co., I am most annoyed that their we're-so-radical marketing explanation tells us that they designed the library to protect us from "specialists", their quotemarks, that is, they're posing as the ?authoritative? nonspecialists to protect us from librarians.

I'm foggy on current idiom, but I think I think Rem Koolhaas is a total tool.

I care more about how the library works as a library, and it does way too much to hide the collection from people. (The same printed blather boasts of sorting the collection by medium, form, rather than content, which is another bit of 'I'm rubber & you're glue'.)

I'd bet a latté that in twenty years this is going to be obviously another provincial building. The ones that look like pastiches now looked like bravura reflections of our region in their day (ferns! Walruses!).

Our librarians will make it all friendly and useful, unless we've spent so much on the buildings that we can't pay for books and people, which is a risk.

[Hal O'Brien]

"Our librarians will make it all friendly and useful, unless we've spent so much on the buildings that we can't pay for books and people, which is a risk."

This is what Christopher Alexander means by the perils of "large lump development" -- having spent all the budget for the large lump, there's nothing left over for site repair. I fear that may well be true with this project, as well.

*^*^*

Amusing side light: I agree Gattaca is both brilliant and very coolly sterile in its look (I personally love the recurring use of a spiral staircase in a story about genetic modification). But the funny part is where the exteriors were shot: a university (Cal Poly Pomona) and a "civic center" (FLlW's Marin County center). The irony with the post you pointed to earlier re Wright, David, is palpable.

[Matthew Amster-Burton]

I'm weighing in late, but my overall impression of the library after this, my third visit, is that it is profoundly amateur.

Forget the unforeseeable problems that crop up in any new building, such as the repair recently completed in the Seattle City Council chambers because the dais was too low. (Is the big table called a dais? I'm cribbing that from the paper.) The library is loaded with *foreseeable* problems. David, are you going to post your photo of the pillar that makes it nigh-impossible to get to the up esclator from anywhere in the Mixing Chamber? And up escalators without down escalators? Escalators that terminate with no hint of where to pick up the next one?

There's an excellent entry in _A Pattern Language_, possibly "Circulation Realms", in which Alexander talks about the psychic cost of hard-to-navigate buildings. I mean "psychic cost" not in some metaphysical sense, just that time spent thinking, "I am completely fucking lost," is time not spent thinking, "Pie is tasty." Bad navigation in the library isn't going to kill anyone. It's just going to annoy people again and again. Luckily, it's so appallingly done that many people will understand that the problem is with the building, not their sense of direction.

One must always fight the impulse to say "I could have done better," but when you get to the point in your architectural career where you are considering putting in a long, skinny up escalator with no accompanying down escalator, it's time for one of those back-to-basics moments.

You know what downtown Seattle building has great navigation? The Bon. No doubt there are all sorts of reasons we could come up with why such a design wouldn't work for the library, but in the end, isn't the goal to design a building that will be a delight for patrons, and then work the rest around that?

Finally, I still like the Living Room, but I hadn't noticed the enormous interior blank wall on the back of the elevator shafts. This is going to make some graffiti artist very, very happy.

It was a pleasure to meet David, Scott, and Chloe, and thanks for having my architecturally jaded friends from New York along.

[Matthew Amster-Burton]

Sorry for the little Dick Cheney moment in my comments. Shortly after posting them, I received the latest issue of Gordon Price's newsletter, Price Tags, which is highly critical of the library. In it, Price says that when they were designing the Vancouver library, they wanted a design like a department store, with lots of ways to get from floor to floor. As usual, any time I have a good idea, they were doing it in Vancouver years ago.

[John]

An article in ICON, has Koolhaas illuminating the ownership of OMA, "We were bought by another firm; since then we’ve bought ourselves back so we are completely independent again. It was a way of reinventing the office."

http://www.icon-magazine.co.uk/issues/013/rem.htm

[John Pastier]

A good and interesting discussion here.

But I think it begins to go off the rails with David's comment: "As to the appearance, one of the problems with 'architectural criticism' which focusses on 'how it looks' is that the matter is simply so subjective."

This seems to imply that the author avoids subjectivity and focusses on that which is objective and rational, yet David is quite liberal in expressing subjective esthetic attitudes -- it's just that they happen to be at odds with those of the national taste-mongers who have declared the library to be a unalloyed masterpiece.

Examples from this thread:
* "the Library is essentially a bore, a whole lot of OK corporate architecture dressed up in pretentious, obsurantist 'design theory.' "
* "I was reminded of nothing more than a the atrium of a Hyatt Hotel or the cold, hard, grand spaces of an airport; all very well and good but not the cozy, intimacy I like in a place ..."
* "I am indifferent to the basic shape and form ..."
* "the structure is just another piece of suburban corporate architecture, or at least in that vernacular; it would do very well in Tyson's Corner."

I don't necessarily disagree with these remarks, but I feel the need to point out that they embody what David is disturbed by in the output of an esthetically-centered commentator. I think that he unconsciously feels that his esthetic sense is somehow centrist, obvious, transparent, reasonable (non-subjective") and perhaps near-universal, while others' is not.

We can't dismiss the esthetic dimension here; it's what separates architecture from simple engineering, construction, and real estate development. One of a building's main functions is to look good in four dimensions. Ugliness or banality is also a major functional flaw. Remember the original three rules -- Firmness, Commodity, and Delight.

So far, no one seems to have commented on the structural system (rule number one) -- it's largely irrational and ad-hoc, and it looks awkward and even ugly in places. This is of course a consequence of having to hold up large expanses of abitrarily shaped non-orthogonal forms, and it must have been a huge cross for a top-notch structural engineer such as Jon Magnusson to bear.

[Mary Kay]

I haven't been to see it yet, but as a (retired) librarian I can tell you I am tired to death of exciting! new! architecture which doesn't take into account how a library is used and what its users and staff need. Frankly, this looks like another one. And yeah, local governmental units can be conned out of a one time lump to build a big thingy, but getting regular money for staff, upkeep, oh, and books, is dammed hard. I have moved libraries far too many times in my career and almost always the new building is a loser. Problem is, designing rooms for rows and rows and rows of booksheloves just isn't very exciting, and, of course, won't make anybody famous.

MKK

[Matthew Amster-Burton]

Hello, John. Good points. I think we have a friend (Neil deMause) in common.

Mary Kay, I think they really did try to take into account how librarians and patrons would use the place. But what Christopher Alexander calls "large lump development" I like to call "creationism," which is the belief that you can design and build a large new system and have it work right on the first try. It doesn't work that way. At best you produce an example with some working features that are copied and improved the next time around.

My librarian uncle visited from out of town this week and fell in love with the book spiral. He's had to deal with unchecked growth of the 001's and the like, and found Seattle's solution elegant. He added that he didn't get lost once.

So I'm hanging onto the possibility that no one will like the library less than "progressive" urbanists and that the average person will enjoy it very much. As much as it bruises my ego, I hope this is correct. I've talked to many people who've been down for their obligatory visit and had an unambiguously good time. Many of them won't be back for years, and heck, I don't go to the Central often myself, because I have a delightful branch library built last year by Johnson/Cutler.

That leaves the building's horrid connection with the street. I have no justification for that.

[John Pastier]

Hi, Matthew. Yup, Neil's a friend. Are you the guy on Capitol Hill that he stays whith when he's in Seattle?

About the book spiral -- has anyone here actually tried to use it for specific research? It turns out that many reference books are not filed according to their Dewey nembers. Many of the 029's are actually shelved hundreds of numbers away. The logic is that these tomes (indexes to architectural journals and general peridicals, for example) are not kept near "the lint trap" at the bottom of the ramp in numerical order, but well above, next to the magazines they refer to.

Logical in one sense, but if you look those indexes up in the catalogue and jot down their call numbers, you wind up wasting time looking for them where they aren't, and then have to find a librarian to straighten it out. I've had similar problems finding DVDs and videotapes. Also, some books are not kept in the stacks, but in "compact storage" shelves that are accessible only to the librarians. You have no way of knowing that from the catalogue, until you can't find them and have to go to a counter for assistance.

This is not that different from the system in the old buiding -- after you can't find something even though you have the Dewey call number, you find a librarian and s/he goes looking for it.

Based on what I've seen over the course of about five working visits, the rank-and-file librarians are not as privately thrilled with the building as the brass are publicly. I've detected frustration, and have seen three of them strongly encouraging a patron to fill out a written complaint form -- er, I mean "comment and suggestion form" about the workings of the place.

[Brian]

Well, with the Seattle Library, OMA certainly gave a foreshadowing of what will happen at the pedestrian level in Dallas's Arts District. I think the most telling picture from the Seattle Library is looking down the sidewalk at the honeycombed lattice just dying into the concrete. Further proof that "context" and "urban fabric" may have meaning, but Star-chitects have very little comprehension. In the Dallas Arts district the Architects all had a fine opportunity to create a vibrant art area in one fell swoop (how often do you get 4 mega venues designed and built within 5 years of each other?). The new Nasher Sculpture garden by Renzo Piano does a GREAT job of engaging the pedestrian walking along the street. Down the block, the Belo Mansion Addition has tucked retail space nicely along what would normally be the back side of a building (though the addition has not received favorable reviews from the Dallas Morning News Architecture Critic--it's not "flashy" enough for his tastes). I fear that with OMA's and even Sir Foster's new Icons, that the "vibrant arts district" will be glizty and monumental, but except for performance night, will rarely be "vibrant."
--all this from looking at pictures of your new library? Is it Friday yet?

[Brian]

Well, with the Seattle Library, OMA certainly gave a foreshadowing of what will happen at the pedestrian level in Dallas's Arts District. I think the most telling picture from the Seattle Library is looking down the sidewalk at the honeycombed lattice just dying into the concrete. Further proof that "context" and "urban fabric" may have meaning, but Star-chitects have very little comprehension. In the Dallas Arts district the Architects all had a fine opportunity to create a vibrant art area in one fell swoop (how often do you get 4 mega venues designed and built within 5 years of each other?). The new Nasher Sculpture garden by Renzo Piano does a GREAT job of engaging the pedestrian walking along the street. Down the block, the Belo Mansion Addition has tucked retail space nicely along what would normally be the back side of a building (though the addition has not received favorable reviews from the Dallas Morning News Architecture Critic--it's not "flashy" enough for his tastes). I fear that with OMA's and even Sir Foster's new Icons, that the "vibrant arts district" will be glizty and monumental, but except for performance night, will rarely be "vibrant."
--all this from looking at pictures of your new library? Is it Friday yet?

[John Pastier]

< the addition has not received favorable reviews from the Dallas Morning News Architecture Critic--it's not "flashy" enough for his tastes >

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Did the unnamed David Dillon actually write the word "flashy" in his review, or are the quotation marks being misused here? I may be wrong, but this gives the appearance of someone putting words in someone else's mouth.

BTW, the more inhospitable edges of the SPL are not along the nearly level 4th and 5th Ave. frontages, but along the steeply sloping side streets.

[John Pastier]

< In the Dallas Arts district the Architects all had a fine opportunity to create a vibrant art area in one fell swoop (how often do you get 4 mega venues designed and built within 5 years of each other?). >

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Four mega venues designed and built within 5 years of one another seem like the exact opposite of a fine opportunity to create a vibrant art area in one fell swoop. The more likely outcome is an arts ghetto removed from the everyday life of the city.

Recommended reading on this point: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

[anon]

I'm a librarian in the building, and one thing I can tell you is that many of the problems with this building - notably wayfinding, signange, safety and restrooms - were observed and anticipated by many service staff years ago. How we as clients could be so consistently bullied and overruled by concept-men astonishes me. But this is just sour grapes from someone who had many ideas and concerns grounded in the provision of service and real-world experience with how people navigate a building, and no input at all in the finished building.

[John Pastier]

Anon:
Was there some kind of clients' committee involved in the process? I know that there was a specially-hired capital projects staff made up of people presumably expert in design, construction, and project management. Where did they stand on the functional/practical issues -- were they unaware, or were they overruled?

And why did the SPL sign off on the notion of a 10-story library that created the need for so much vertical travel? The highest reading room (9th through 8th levels on the spiral?) seems about 95% empty even when the building is very busy.

I think that the required floor space could have fit into about 6 or 7 stories. Does anyone know how many floors there are in the Vancouver and Chicago main libraries? Chicago may also be in the 10-story range, but I think Vancouver's is more like 6.