Sunday, May 23, 2004
The New Seattle Public Library
Today the new building for the downtown headquarters of the Seattle Public Library was opened to the public for the first time. Despite receiving encomiums from several major architectural critics, none of whom will have to live with, to use or help to pay for the building and its inevitably expensive upkeep, the building is a disaster. In any reasonable sense, Koolhaas’ building is a truly obnoxious bit of blight in the center of Seattle, violating all aesthetic and social principles suggesting that a well-designed building should be sensitive to its context and suitable for the needs of its users. The building meets neither of those criteria. This intensely anti-urban structure would be much more at home surrounded by acres of chemically enhanced lawns, all of it enclosed inside electrified fences, serving as a state penitentiary.
It was amusing, if ultimately dispiriting, to read the architectural critics, for example New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp’s dismissal of the Art Museum as “rancid” and his description of the Experience Music Project circus tent as a dead, beached sea-monster even as he waxed ecstatic about the Koolhaas building. In the not too distant future the next New York Times architecture critic visiting Seattle is not unlikely to view the library building as a horrible blotch on the city’s landscape, worse than either of the other two because of its size and location as well as its completely unsatisfactory design for the use it has been put to. Among its traits, architectural criticism is the art of being sneeringly dismissive of all that is not au courant and in step with the latest fashions.
Soon enough the Koolhaas building will not be au courant, and within a decade, perhaps even within a year or two, the cost of upkeep and the dysfunction of the building are likely to be seen by Seattle city government and taxpayers as a burden, perhaps as an intolerable one. The building promises to be anti-functional in ways that cannot be afforded in a time of tight municipal budgets. Those budgets have already led to shortened library hours and periodic week-long closures. Ms. Jacobs, the city librarian, has shrilly stated on numerous occasions that the library operation budget is separate from the construction budget, and thus the costs of construction do not bear on library operations. True enough until now, but what about costs of maintenance and renovation costs to make the building functional, or at least not anti-functional, once it is occupied? Those are no longer construction but rather operational costs, and I have serious doubts the City Council or Seattle voters will be amenable to spending the multiple millions necessary just to make the building a tolerable place for library patrons and a decent place for those who work there.
Perhaps the city government will move the library into to some inexpensive warehouse building, or simply close the library altogether as has been proposed more than once. The Koolhaas library building could then be converted into a new city jail, the function for which its exterior appears to have been designed. The outside of the new library building looks like nothing so much as a deconstructed maximum security prison, the cell blocks exploded and piled randomly on top of each other with the diagonal grid of windows an out-of-scale chain link fence. The poorly articulated entrances are unwelcoming in the extreme, reminding one of movie visions of the gates of San Quentin, Sing Sing or Walla Walla, and saying “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
While the aesthetics of the building are, to use Muschamp’s term “rancid,” serious criticism must be of how well it is likely to function, and the analysis is not promising. The main entrance was put on the 5th Avenue side, at the top of a steep grade usually avoided by pedestrians and at a maximum uphill distance from the bus tunnel exits and main downtown bus stops. The much more pedestrian friendly 4th Avenue side has but a tiny and uninviting entrance into the Children’s Department. Rarely has a central city public building, especially a library intended for intensive usage, been more deliberate in its disregard of, or perhaps in its outright contempt for, pedestrian access. Although there is nothing close to adequate parking for patrons inside the building, the design is a very suburban one and intended for those who enter through the parking garage, just like suburban shoppers in malls or prisoners who enter jails through underground garages unseen by the public.
Including a couple of marginally interesting general spaces, ones about as visually exciting as the entrance foyer at the new King County courthouse complex in Kent, the interior takes its design cues from shopping malls rather than from successful older libraries. Circulation patterns inside the building are far from readily apparent, just like the most up-to-date shopping malls where the design goal is to keep the customer a prisoner of commerce. Indeed the building is likely to be a nightmarish place for anyone with even the slightest touch of agoraphobia. The bizarrely named mixing chamber will soon be full of people who need answers to the simplest of questions, including all too frequently “how do I get out of this awful place?” The peculiar ramp used for shelving books, and the lack of adequate spaces within close proximity to the book stacks for stopping to browse through titles, make the library particularly unfriendly for research users, especially as the library insists on using the antiquated Dewey decimal system for shelving non-fiction titles. Dewey decimal classification frequently assigns books on similar topics radically different numbers and thus, with the collection ordered solely on that system, at great distances from each other on the book ramp. And each visit to the book stacks from the reading areas will require a patron to lug briefcases, laptops, overcoats, etc., for as in all public buildings there will be the usual “terrorism” panic along with problems of petty theft. Given the pathetic book and journal collection of the Seattle Public Library, serious research is clearly not one of its goals, so perhaps that is a moot issue.
It remains to be seen if glare will make reading in the various sitting areas all but impossible. The vast expanse of glass is not promising, but the difficulty and expense of cleaning it may in short order make the glare issue also moot, for the glass will soon enough become opaque with urban grime. Heat gain and problems of air circulation are also matters of concern. Will it take half the electricity production of the Skagit River dams just to keep the greenhouse-like building at a tolerable temperature during a warm and sunny summer? This afternoon with a little sun and a large number of visitors, it was close to uncomfortable. Will the stench of the unwashed street people who will soon call the library home, several of them were walking around looking for a place to settle when I visited today, make the air all but unbreathable unless the library becomes a ventilation wind tunnel as its continuous floor plan will facilitate? Will the escalators work, and if so will they become a noise generator just like the escalators in the old central library? Will noise levels in the vast hard-surfaced spaces make the building an aurally uncomfortable place to be, let alone allow it to be a decent place to read, think, and do research? These are but a few of the many technical problems any semi-competent architectural analyst should have asked long before construction began. The answers to those questions I have seen are not promising, and my first visit to the building suggests they were inadequately addressed. I fear the glamour of a “name” architect was so strong that any practical question was soon forgotten in the garish light emanating from celebrity.
Whatever the technical problems may be, and based on the experience reported with other Koolhaas buildings they are likely to be numerous and extremely expensive to repair, the interior of the building certainly does not show how very much money was spent on furnishings and interior design. The ticky-tacky finishes have the look of cheap materials purchased at a local Home Depot. Where they have color there are lurid and garish color schemes, including a dominant shade of nauseating green for circulation elements, a color which, if colors could make one sick, would be virulent indeed. The furniture looks as if it has been purchased in the lower price aisles at IKEA. It will be interesting to see what condition the furnishings are in by the end of the summer not to mention in a year or two. Lots of technological gimcracks, mostly of the kind that will not survive the first few years of hard usage, have been included. It is said that the building is a “dumb” one; that is it has few hard-wired technologies. If so, that is one of the building’s few virtues, for most of the new technology it currently contains will be outdated in two or three years, if it isn’t already. Libraries are notorious for adopting inadequate technologies, usually at the expense of an old, extremely useful and well-tested technology, the printed page still the best servant for most patrons’ needs.
There is a long and distinguished history of library building in the United States and abroad. From that history have come a few truly exceptional buildings, inspiring and functional at the same time. The Boston, New York and Los Angeles central public libraries and several major university libraries come to mind. . All of them have recognized that a library can contain works of art and it can have some artistic elements of the highest order as part of its design, but in the end it is, and must be if it is to function for the purpose it was built, a warehouse with sitting rooms attached. The history of libraries has led to some good and useful rules of design that are ignored at the risk of creating a library that fails to meet the needs of its patrons (and sometimes is also a truly awful place for its employees). The Koolhaas building has ignored or blithely pushed aside most of those rules. Whether, despite its design, it succeeds or not remains to be tested, but if I were asked to place money on a bet that it will be a miserable failure, I know how I would bet.
It was amusing, if ultimately dispiriting, to read the architectural critics, for example New York Times critic Herbert Muschamp’s dismissal of the Art Museum as “rancid” and his description of the Experience Music Project circus tent as a dead, beached sea-monster even as he waxed ecstatic about the Koolhaas building. In the not too distant future the next New York Times architecture critic visiting Seattle is not unlikely to view the library building as a horrible blotch on the city’s landscape, worse than either of the other two because of its size and location as well as its completely unsatisfactory design for the use it has been put to. Among its traits, architectural criticism is the art of being sneeringly dismissive of all that is not au courant and in step with the latest fashions.
Soon enough the Koolhaas building will not be au courant, and within a decade, perhaps even within a year or two, the cost of upkeep and the dysfunction of the building are likely to be seen by Seattle city government and taxpayers as a burden, perhaps as an intolerable one. The building promises to be anti-functional in ways that cannot be afforded in a time of tight municipal budgets. Those budgets have already led to shortened library hours and periodic week-long closures. Ms. Jacobs, the city librarian, has shrilly stated on numerous occasions that the library operation budget is separate from the construction budget, and thus the costs of construction do not bear on library operations. True enough until now, but what about costs of maintenance and renovation costs to make the building functional, or at least not anti-functional, once it is occupied? Those are no longer construction but rather operational costs, and I have serious doubts the City Council or Seattle voters will be amenable to spending the multiple millions necessary just to make the building a tolerable place for library patrons and a decent place for those who work there.
Perhaps the city government will move the library into to some inexpensive warehouse building, or simply close the library altogether as has been proposed more than once. The Koolhaas library building could then be converted into a new city jail, the function for which its exterior appears to have been designed. The outside of the new library building looks like nothing so much as a deconstructed maximum security prison, the cell blocks exploded and piled randomly on top of each other with the diagonal grid of windows an out-of-scale chain link fence. The poorly articulated entrances are unwelcoming in the extreme, reminding one of movie visions of the gates of San Quentin, Sing Sing or Walla Walla, and saying “Abandon all hope ye who enter here.”
While the aesthetics of the building are, to use Muschamp’s term “rancid,” serious criticism must be of how well it is likely to function, and the analysis is not promising. The main entrance was put on the 5th Avenue side, at the top of a steep grade usually avoided by pedestrians and at a maximum uphill distance from the bus tunnel exits and main downtown bus stops. The much more pedestrian friendly 4th Avenue side has but a tiny and uninviting entrance into the Children’s Department. Rarely has a central city public building, especially a library intended for intensive usage, been more deliberate in its disregard of, or perhaps in its outright contempt for, pedestrian access. Although there is nothing close to adequate parking for patrons inside the building, the design is a very suburban one and intended for those who enter through the parking garage, just like suburban shoppers in malls or prisoners who enter jails through underground garages unseen by the public.
Including a couple of marginally interesting general spaces, ones about as visually exciting as the entrance foyer at the new King County courthouse complex in Kent, the interior takes its design cues from shopping malls rather than from successful older libraries. Circulation patterns inside the building are far from readily apparent, just like the most up-to-date shopping malls where the design goal is to keep the customer a prisoner of commerce. Indeed the building is likely to be a nightmarish place for anyone with even the slightest touch of agoraphobia. The bizarrely named mixing chamber will soon be full of people who need answers to the simplest of questions, including all too frequently “how do I get out of this awful place?” The peculiar ramp used for shelving books, and the lack of adequate spaces within close proximity to the book stacks for stopping to browse through titles, make the library particularly unfriendly for research users, especially as the library insists on using the antiquated Dewey decimal system for shelving non-fiction titles. Dewey decimal classification frequently assigns books on similar topics radically different numbers and thus, with the collection ordered solely on that system, at great distances from each other on the book ramp. And each visit to the book stacks from the reading areas will require a patron to lug briefcases, laptops, overcoats, etc., for as in all public buildings there will be the usual “terrorism” panic along with problems of petty theft. Given the pathetic book and journal collection of the Seattle Public Library, serious research is clearly not one of its goals, so perhaps that is a moot issue.
It remains to be seen if glare will make reading in the various sitting areas all but impossible. The vast expanse of glass is not promising, but the difficulty and expense of cleaning it may in short order make the glare issue also moot, for the glass will soon enough become opaque with urban grime. Heat gain and problems of air circulation are also matters of concern. Will it take half the electricity production of the Skagit River dams just to keep the greenhouse-like building at a tolerable temperature during a warm and sunny summer? This afternoon with a little sun and a large number of visitors, it was close to uncomfortable. Will the stench of the unwashed street people who will soon call the library home, several of them were walking around looking for a place to settle when I visited today, make the air all but unbreathable unless the library becomes a ventilation wind tunnel as its continuous floor plan will facilitate? Will the escalators work, and if so will they become a noise generator just like the escalators in the old central library? Will noise levels in the vast hard-surfaced spaces make the building an aurally uncomfortable place to be, let alone allow it to be a decent place to read, think, and do research? These are but a few of the many technical problems any semi-competent architectural analyst should have asked long before construction began. The answers to those questions I have seen are not promising, and my first visit to the building suggests they were inadequately addressed. I fear the glamour of a “name” architect was so strong that any practical question was soon forgotten in the garish light emanating from celebrity.
Whatever the technical problems may be, and based on the experience reported with other Koolhaas buildings they are likely to be numerous and extremely expensive to repair, the interior of the building certainly does not show how very much money was spent on furnishings and interior design. The ticky-tacky finishes have the look of cheap materials purchased at a local Home Depot. Where they have color there are lurid and garish color schemes, including a dominant shade of nauseating green for circulation elements, a color which, if colors could make one sick, would be virulent indeed. The furniture looks as if it has been purchased in the lower price aisles at IKEA. It will be interesting to see what condition the furnishings are in by the end of the summer not to mention in a year or two. Lots of technological gimcracks, mostly of the kind that will not survive the first few years of hard usage, have been included. It is said that the building is a “dumb” one; that is it has few hard-wired technologies. If so, that is one of the building’s few virtues, for most of the new technology it currently contains will be outdated in two or three years, if it isn’t already. Libraries are notorious for adopting inadequate technologies, usually at the expense of an old, extremely useful and well-tested technology, the printed page still the best servant for most patrons’ needs.
There is a long and distinguished history of library building in the United States and abroad. From that history have come a few truly exceptional buildings, inspiring and functional at the same time. The Boston, New York and Los Angeles central public libraries and several major university libraries come to mind. . All of them have recognized that a library can contain works of art and it can have some artistic elements of the highest order as part of its design, but in the end it is, and must be if it is to function for the purpose it was built, a warehouse with sitting rooms attached. The history of libraries has led to some good and useful rules of design that are ignored at the risk of creating a library that fails to meet the needs of its patrons (and sometimes is also a truly awful place for its employees). The Koolhaas building has ignored or blithely pushed aside most of those rules. Whether, despite its design, it succeeds or not remains to be tested, but if I were asked to place money on a bet that it will be a miserable failure, I know how I would bet.
