One For The Books

By Richard Lacayo/Seattle

If you expect a public library to sit quietly with its hands folded, the new Seattle Central Library is not for you. It has a lunging, irregular exterior wrapped in folds of glass covered with a honeycomb of steel. There are hook holes all over it, so the window washers can scale the angled surface like rock climbers. As buildings go, this one manages to look both precarious and enduring, headlong and immemorial. If Picasso ever painted a library, it might look like this.

Actually, it's the biggest U.S. project of Rem Koolhaas, the influential Dutch architect-thinker and hipster-polemicist. "For me it's a building that accommodates both stability and instability," he says. "The things you can predict and the things you can't." What he means is that the library is designed to accommodate whatever new technologies and purposes it may have to serve in the future. And Koolhaas is somebody who understands all too well the power of things you can't predict. The library, which opens officially next month, is not just a new symbol for the city. It's a personal vindication for the architect, an announcement that, at age 59, he is thriving in the American phase of his career after a period in which several major U.S. projects abruptly fell through and his views on the future of building got notably sour. Opening this summer is Koolhaas' second Prada store, in Beverly Hills, Calif. And last September saw the debut of his McCormick Tribune Campus Center at Chicago's Illinois Institute of Technology. Another instant icon, it's topped by a massive corrugated-steel tube intended both to muffle the noise of the railway line that passes overhead and to encourage another sound--wow!--from anybody passing by.

These days Koolhaas' firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), has busy operations in Rotterdam and New York City and massive new projects under way in Europe and Asia. But for years Koolhaas was far better known as a theorist than as a builder. His 1978 book, Delirious New York, an approving account of the uncontrolled development of the Manhattan streetscape, was that rare thing, a big seller about architectural theory. Even now he remains the very model of the oracular modern architect, given to panoramic pronouncements on modernity ("If space junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet"). His highest goal is to restore possibilities for human interaction of whatever kind. Congestion and sprawl he sees as advantages. The posthuman megalopolises of the 21st century--Tokyo, Atlanta, Shanghai--are just so many jumbo opportunities. On the other hand, he is sick to death of skyscrapers, which he considers vertical cylinders that isolate people instead of putting them into circulation with one another. "It's hypocritical for anyone to argue that skyscrapers are part of civil society and public space," says Koolhaas.

The Seattle library began five years ago with a series of public hearings at which Koolhaas refused the role of genius architect and adroitly played it anyway. Early in the process, Joshua Ramus, the OMA partner who collaborated with him on the design, offered the people of Seattle a very Koolhaasian view of architecture. "We're looking for ways," he said, "to lose control of the design process."

Of course, they never actually did. After three months of research into libraries around the world, Koolhaas and Ramus concluded that the two chief challenges the building would have to address were the unpredictable future proliferation of new technologies that the library would need to encompass and the new social functions that it may have to serve. The solution was a library organized as a series of five internal enclosed "platforms," from basement to upper-level administrative areas, each to serve a function such as parking, offices and meeting space. Instead of being stacked neatly one atop another in a rectangle, they are shifted, some thrust forward, others back, which accounts for the building's irregular silhouette. Alternating with the platforms are four open areas for a children's library, reading rooms and reference desks. The largest of the platforms, the one holding the books, is actually a continuous, gentle spiral of shelves, a kind of interior avenue for the library stroller. Rather than segregate different subject areas on separate floors, the spiral presents the entire collection in a continuous flow designed to encourage people to move freely among topics, to have those serendipitous encounters Koolhaas loves.

Once the platforms and interspaces were decided upon, it remained only to arrange them and wrap the irregular stack in a glass skin held within a latticework of steel. That lattice functions as an exterior structural support, reducing the need for interior trusses and columns, which in turn makes possible wide sweeps of free space inside, including an upper-level reading room with views onto Puget Sound.

The platforms could have just as well been called flying carpets. All through this library there's a sense of being suspended in midair, with buildings and sky summoning you from just beyond the angled glass. There are spaces you might even call lyrical except that lyricism is not a word in the Koolhaas vocabulary. His buildings can be fascinating, vexing, exciting, even annoying, but don't count on them to produce the indisputable new kind of beauty that you routinely get from Frank Gehry. Beauty is an occasional by-product of the Koolhaas approach but never an aim.

You understand that right away at his new student center at the Illinois Institute, a campus designed and once headed by none other than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Thanks to the sleeve for the railway that sits atop the center's V-shaped roof, it has an aggressively awkward exterior, like a shed being crushed by a giant auto muffler. Inside it's a kind of bright angular cyclotron designed for the purpose of accelerating human fusion. By encouraging students to literally cross paths at every turn, it offers itself as a substitute for the city that once bordered closely on the campus before urban renewal swept it away. "By the time we arrived," Koolhaas says, "the city had disappeared. The building is an attempt to reintroduce density."

A signal event for Koolhaas came in 1999 when a project to design a new Los Angeles headquarters for Universal Studios collapsed after the company decided, in the frenzy of media mergers, it needed its money elsewhere. From that experience he concluded that architecture was too slow for a marketplace in which the global conglomerates that have the heft for the big commissions emerge and disintegrate in less time than it takes to turn blueprints into buildings--usually about five years. But there was worse to come. Over the next few years, proposals to expand the Whitney Museum in New York City and reconfigure the Los Angeles County Museum of Art also fell victim to belt tightening. A proposed Manhattan hotel was canceled too.

Licking his wounds all the while, Koolhaas turned increasingly toward Asia, especially China, where explosive growth has created a boom for Western and Japanese architects and where the Beijing authorities have the power to see major projects through to completion. His most important recent commission is a massive new headquarters in Beijing for China Central Television (CCTV). It's the most radically configured large building in years, a torqued trapezoid that looks a bit like a skyscraper attempting a somersault. "The building has been organized as a loop that allows it to connect every component of television making," he says. "That form makes for more of a community."

The CCTV building is a sensitive commission; it's the headquarters for the government-controlled media operation of a one-party state, an odd project for a man committed to ideas like spontaneous connection and untrammeled movement. Koolhaas has been criticized for cozying up to one of the most noxious departments of the Beijing power apparatus. In his defense, he insists that China is evolving into a freer society. "The Chinese are putting in place the legal and political infrastructure that will enable them to manage their transitions," he says. "We did not go ahead before we established in our own minds that the conditions for CCTV to evolve into something like the BBC were in place." Something like the BBC? Let's see its first documentary on the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Koolhaas loves contradiction. With this project, he may find himself moving ever deeper into one. If he needs a refresher on what an open flow of information really looks like, he should revisit Seattle. What he has made there is a masterly example of what freedom of movement is all about.