GAD Editorial · Published ·
The Seattle Central Library doesn't look like a library, and that was precisely the assignment. When Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of OMA (working with LMN) won the commission, they started from a blunt question: what is a library for, now that information lives everywhere? Their answer, opened on 23 May 2004, is a building that refuses to behave.
Five principal program platforms across eleven floors — wrapped in a faceted skin of glass and steel — create a vertical sequence of distinct atmospheres: a soaring "living room" at the base, a bright red meeting-room floor on Level 4 and a "mixing chamber" on Level 5 where librarians and visitors meet, and, most radically, the Books Spiral, four continuous floors of nonfiction shelving arranged as a single ramp, so the Dewey Decimal system never has to be broken up by floor changes. Meeting rooms, an auditorium, and a children's area each get their own climate, acoustically and visually separated, inside one connected volume.
The numbers tell the ambition: 362,987 square feet, 11 stories, built as the third Central Library on this downtown site. Its national AIA Honor Award in 2005 recognised an ambitious civic building that made its internal organisation part of its public identity.
Two decades on, the library still feels like an argument about public space that the city is lucky to be having in built form: that a civic institution can be strange, specific, and wildly popular all at once.
Key facts
- Completed: 2004 (opened 23 May 2004)
- Location: Seattle, Washington, USA
- Architects: Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of OMA, with LMN
- Scale: 362,987 sq ft, 11 stories
- Recognition: national AIA Honor Award, 2005