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.