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Library architect earns Pritzker Prize
Monday, April 17, 2000
By REGINA HACKETT
Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect who is designing the new Seattle Public Library downtown, is this year's winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Now in its 23rd year, the Pritzker is considered the top honor in the field, intended to honor living architects whose work "demonstrates talent and vision" and makes a "consistent and significant contribution to humanity."
In Seattle, Koolhaas' contribution will be a honeycombed, wire/mesh and glass building that will extend 12 stories high in a series of sliding platforms.
City Librarian Deborah Jacobs thinks Koolhaas "richly deserves" the award. "He has captured the essence of what we're trying to do as a library," she said. "We gave him a detailed building program and he delivered on all the particulars. He listens so well and is able to translate that information into a brilliant design.
"I love the way his building soars," she continued. "Even at this stage, I know what it will feel like to walk through it. Rem solves problems I don't see being solved by other libraries, such as how to move around the collections and get a feeling that's both intimate and spacious, and how to encourage both silence and exuberance."
Writing in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, architecture critic Glenn Weiss said the $156 million downtown library that will open in 2003 "has the potential to be the finest contemporary civic structure on the West Coast, surpassing the Getty complex in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the libraries of Phoenix and Vancouver, B.C."
The award of the Pritzker Prize to Koolhaas was announced today. He will receive it, along with $100,000, in a ceremony in Jerusalem on May 29.
Two other Pritzker Prize-winning architects have made significant design contributions in Seattle. Frank Gehry won it in 1989 and is responsible for the Experience Music Project at Seattle Center, which will open June 23. Robert Venturi won it in 1991, the same year the Seattle Art Museum, designed by him, opened downtown.
In a statement from the Pritzker committee, Thomas Pritzker said Koolhaas was chosen principally because he's in tune with the future.
"He has been called a prophet of a new modern architecture," Pritzker said. "It's not surprising that (New York's) Museum of Modern Art has had not one, but two exhibitions devoted to his ideas."
At 56, Koolhaas is young by architectural standards, just beginning to hit his stride and secure the kind of commissions that demonstrate the range of his ideas.
A house he designed for a self-described shut-in in Bordeaux, France, created worlds within the world, with a moving platform to link its three, vastly different levels together, from womblike to airy. Time magazine gave it a best design award in 1998.
Koolhaas has produced a museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, worked on a housing development in Fukuoka, Japan, and created a new embassy for the Netherlands in Berlin. His 1987 building for the Netherlands Dance Theatre in The Hague was cited as one of nine top buildings of the 20th century in the March issue of Art & Architecture.
Since 1975, Koolhaas has been part of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, better known as OMA, in London, with Madelon Vriesendorp and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis.
Currently under development is a student center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, as well as buildings in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
His first book, "Delirious, New York" was published in 1978 and made him a famous architect before he realized the design for any buildings. He describes the book, which examined the living pattern of urban growth, as "an exploration of the culture of congestion."
In 1994, he published his cryptically titled "S,M,L,SL," combining photos, plans, fiction, cartoons, essays and random thoughts. This second and more eccentric collection of his musings is credited with making adventurous architectural thinking attractive to the MTV generation.
Since 1995, he has been a professor of architecture at Harvard University, leading a student-based research group that studies the urban condition around the world.
J. Carter Brown, former director of Washington D.C.'s National Gallery and chairman of this year's Pritzker jury, praised Koolhaas' "restless mind, conceptual brilliance and ability to make a building sing."
Architectural critic and Pritzker juror Ada Louise Huxtable observed that his example and his ideas expressed through his writing have already produced a "radical new group of gifted younger practitioners."
Koolhaas has said repeatedly that he considers the design for the Seat
tle Public Library one of most important in his career. Soon after he was chosen, he replied to the question of what the library might look like by saying he prided himself on having no preconceptions but relished the "opportunity to work on such a stable symbol of collective life."
P-I Art Critic Regina Hackett can be reached at 206-448-8332 or reginahackett@seattle-pi.com
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