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Structure 'pushes the envelope' for design and construction
Thursday, May 4, 2000
By PHUONG LE
Push through the glass doors of Seattle's new Central Library in 2003, and you'll find a place where technology fuses with books in innovative and intimate ways.
Under detailed designs revealed yesterday, the new 355,000-square-foot library is a 15-floor structure where computerized bulletin boards exist alongside cozy, carpeted reading areas and generous gathering spaces.
Architect Rem Koolhaas drew nearly 1,500 citizens to his presentation at Benaroya Hall yesterday, proving every bit the rising star and recent winner of the field's highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
With Koolhaas' OMA Architects working with Seattle's LMN Architects, the downtown library has been gaining national attention, leading one local architecture critic to call it the finest contemporary civic structure on the West Coast.
The $159 million library appears to float as five giant platforms zig zag, and the entire building is encased by an unusual meshlike metal "skin."
Critics had wondered after initial designs in December whether there was structural support to withstand an earthquake.
Yesterday, structural engineers reassured the public that it would.
Engineers with Ove Arup & Partners said the skin, a honeycomb pattern comprised of intersecting beams and steel pipes, and vertical trusses would give the library more than enough seismic support.
Koolhaas refined his vision of "the library's increased role as a social center, no longer just centered around books."
In addition to Internet terminals, a cafe, and an auditorium announced earlier, Koolhaas introduced a new idea for the book collection where a spiral ramp would allow continuous flow among books in the order of the Dewey Decimal system.
After receiving public input from citizens' groups and the library staff, the architects raised the children's level, placed fiction books in the "living room" and multi-lingual books on the main floor.
Of Seattle's public process, Koolhaas said: "I think it's working out fairly well. In a way, it's interesting that Seattle has still kept its civic interest . . . "
The new library is scheduled to open in 2003 at the current library location at 1000 Fourth Ave. Trustees are working out an agreement to temporarily move into a new building at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center which the Museum of History and Industry would later occupy.
Scott C. Baumler, a partner of Mandeville Berge Box architects, watched expectantly from his second-row seat.
"He (Koolhaas) tends to push the envelope of design and construction, and we want to learn how he's going to pull it off," said Baumler. "Seattle's a climate that is unforgiving if he makes a mistake."
Visitors who enter the new library on Fourth Avenue walking pass a plaza dotted with trees and through glass doors leading to a well-lit vestibule. To the left is the auditorium and nearby is the children's room. A 200-space parking garage is underground.
Light radiates through slanted glass walls and roofs, allowing people outside to view the different activities inside.
In the kids' area, smaller story-telling spaces, bookshelves and larger reading spaces are interspersed through an open area.
"It's not funny, cute and relentlessly Disney-fied," Koolhaas said. "We thought it was important to treat children seriously."
Take the escalators up to the next level, or enter on the Fifth Avenue side, to find the library's living room or so-called "nerve center."
Here, you encounter a multi-lingual section, teen section and plenty of space for social gatherings.
Intimate reading areas, resembling a carpeted living room, contrast with the floors -- translucent tiles on concrete -- where new technology would project changing images to help guide patrons to things they ask about.
"It's the living room for the entire city," Koolhaas said.
One floor up is the mixing chamber, a one-stop shop for visitors to get information from librarians. One level above is the reading room, with water and skyline views, where most of the books are located.
A "Dewey run" ramp takes a visitor on a gentle slope from the 000 to 999 level of the Dewey decimal system. Start at the top. Browse religion at the 200 level, follow the spiral to politics and economics at the 330 level and finish off with world geography and history at 909.
A vertical atrium housing the elevators will connect the rooftop terrace to the bottom floor.
"I'm amazed by both the complexity and simplicity of it," City Librarian Deborah C. Jacobs said.
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