Seattle Library - Koolhaas

[Kris]

May 18, 2003

Rem Readings

By CLAIRE DEDERER



Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, has designed a new downtown Seattle library, set to open in 2004. The model looks not unlike a handful of blocks a 2-year-old has crammed in his mom's fishnet stocking. Sheathed in glass and metal mesh, the library is meant to be a kind of temple of light.

Seattleites aren't buying it. To hear people talk, there are a million reasons not to build this library. When Koolhaas unveiled his plans in 1999, public judgment was swift and sure. A Seattle Times columnist wrote, ''It is hideous, like a giant rabbit cage built by Timothy Leary.'' Another local writer expressed loathing for Koolhaas's very being, referring to him as ''that little Prada-loafer-wearing, gibberish-spouting architect.'' Letters to the editor bristled with some pretty-strong-for-Seattle words: ''horror,'' ''ugly,'' ''stupidity.''

The library has its fans, but even they tend to be more enthusiastic about the opportunity for debate than for the actual design. ''I'm hoping it will help make Seattle a place where architecture is part of the discourse,'' Emily Hall, an art critic, says. ''In Los Angeles, they know the differences between architects the way we know the difference between a latte and a macchiato.''

At a recent dinner party, some friends and I got to talking about what a library ought to look like. ''I don't want a library full of light,'' Sally Clark, a housing advocate, said. ''I want a cozy library.''

Teresa Howard, a caterer, agreed that a library should feel librarylike. ''I don't want to go to a bank in a house,'' she said. ''I want to go to a bank that feels like a bank.''

Sally added, ''I want a library where I can be studious and put on my glasses.'' I reminded her that she doesn't wear glasses. ''I think you know what I mean,'' she said.

In Seattle, people feel unusually proprietary about the library. We worry, as the writer Jonathan Raban says, ''about all that glass and light, and what it will do to books.'' We worry, too, that a library designed by a technology-happy postmodernist will allow little room for dreary old print.

Our worries go beyond a cool curatorial concern for the book. Much of the library backlash can be attributed to the fear of being conned by big-city hucksters. This isn't just xenophobia. People in Seattle have reason to feel crabby about buildings designed by famous architects. Twelve years ago, we got Robert Venturi's dull -- yet impossible to navigate -- Seattle Art Museum, dominated by a gigantic staircase to nowhere. Its massive facade inspired a general yawn. In 2000, Frank Gehry gave us the garishly colored, extravagantly crumpled and disarmingly silly Experience Music Project. It was met with derision. Around the local public television station, E.M.P.'s neighbor, the building is known as the Hemorrhoids.

We not only felt disappointed by these buildings, we felt burned. Venturi's art museum and Gehry's E.M.P. pale beside their earlier work at, respectively, the National Gallery in London and the Guggenheim Bilbao. Dave Root, a designer friend, calls the local buildings ''lame side jobs.'' Seattleites wondered whether these famous architects were tossing cheap knockoffs to a provincial city or, worse, were privately mocking us.

To be fair, Koolhaas came to town at an inauspicious moment. He presented his plans just months before the tech-stock bubble burst. So not only were people here already feeling victimized by fancy architects, but they had also now lost their money, their stock options and in many cases their jobs. A new $165 million library started to look a little show-offy.

As it goes up in the center of town, the library now feels like a message to the present from a headier era. This became painfully clear when I screened a video of Koolhaas's 1999 design presentation. To watch that footage is to open a time capsule. He speaks of e-books. He says that the book may become ''historical.'' He is an architect designing an important, multimillion-dollar building in one of the technology capitals of the world. Hilariously, he struggles with the AV.

One drizzly spring afternoon, I went downtown to see the site for myself. I got to wear a hard hat. As I toured the building with the city librarian, Deborah Jacobs, and Sam Miller, an architect at a Seattle firm working with Koolhaas, they laid out the floor plan. The library, built on a steep hill, has entrances on two street levels. The bottom floor will house the children's library and foreign-language resources. On the main floor, fiction stacks will be displayed in an atrium with a long angled wall of reinforced glass flying upward. Nonfiction will switchback up a four-story spiral ramp, starting with Dewey Decimal number 000 (computers and general reference) to a summit at 999 (extraterrestrial worlds -- no kidding). At the top, a grand reading room wings out over the city.

The logic of the place and its friendliness to the reader are apparent. The Dewey ramp makes a kind of glorious, literal, plodding sense. The reading room feels like an assertion that books deserve a glamorous venue. And what could be more true to the democratic nature of a library than putting the children's section and the foreign-language materials on the street level? As for the building's facade, the jutting platforms may look like architectural whimsy from the street, but they stick out for good reason: each is situated to take full advantage of the site's corridor views of Puget Sound and the surrounding mountains.

Meanwhile, Miller assuaged my worries about light decaying the books. The glass is embedded with a metal mesh and coated to screen out harmful rays, and the Dewey ramp runs up the center of the building, away from the windows. Jacobs reassured me that there would be nearly double the space for books and materials compared with the old downtown library and more of the collection would be in open, browsable stacks.

As I stood there on the top floor with the rain blowing in, my suspicions fell away. Koolhaas's building didn't feel like a trick someone was playing on my city. It felt like a clever anticipation of everything a reader could want. I felt as if it had been designed just for me.

Claire Dederer is a writer in Seattle.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

New central library is not by the book

Light-filled structure is set to open May 23

Wednesday, February 4, 2004

By KATHY MULADY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER


Pedestrians cross Madison Street at Fourth Avenue, walking past Seattle's new library. The library, now eight months behind schedule and being built at a cost of $165 million, is a honeycomb of windows and high-ceilinged rooms.


In a view from inside Seattle's new central library, Gabe Reisdorff vacuums construction dust from the windows at the top level of the building.

From the outside, Seattle's new central library looks nothing like the soldier-straight buildings around it.

Just wait until you see the inside.

It is an education for anyone who thinks of libraries as cozy, softly lit structures with oak bookshelves, a few desks and a card catalog in the center of it all.

This is as far from Carnegie as you can get.

"I don't think people quite understand what this is. It is really quite spectacular," Sam Miller, principal with LMN Architects, told reporters and photographers who got a tour of the building yesterday.

Eleven floors are tied together by a honeycomb of steel-framed windows that flood the large high-ceilinged rooms with diffused light.

The children's area on the main floor is spiked with floor-to-ceiling leaning columns of concrete and hard floors of bamboo.

Everywhere, there is galvanized steel and aluminum, soaring spaces and swaths of light. A metal-framed conveyor belt on the main level carries books overhead like a silvery snake to another floor where they are mechanically sorted and returned to the shelves.

The main floor also has a 275-seat auditorium, as well as literacy and foreign language services.

There is even a self-checkout desk, just like at the grocery store.

Without books, bookcases, furniture, art or even finished floors yet, it is hard to tell what the final effect will be.

The library, now eight months behind schedule, has its grand opening set for May 23.

The Seattle Public Library and Hoffman Construction are still hashing out who must pay $8.4 million in extra costs connected to construction delays.

Hoffman Construction said the extra costs are closer to $16.9 million. A dispute-resolution board recommended the reduced amount.

Most of the extra costs are related to the complex steel web that holds the whole thing together.

The whole thing, in fact, seems confusing during a first walk-through.

"It's intuitive," City Librarian Deborah Jacobs said to reassure reporters and photographers.

Linda Larson, a member of the library board, described the interior layout as "unfolding" to visitors.

From many higher floors you can look down on the levels below.

From every corner you can watch the buzz of the city outside.

Like other buildings designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, Seattle's new library has an ultramodern feel.

"It isn't a design he just pulled out of a drawer and applied to this city -- anything but," said Miller, whose architecture firm became a partner in the new library with Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture in the Netherlands.

"This design is very specific for Seattle and for this program," said Miller.

At the moment, the inside looks gray and cold and big.

But the building will add soft-fabric art in the children's area, focusing on folk stories and such characters as Paul Bunyan's blue ox Babe and a colorful phoenix.

Bright materials and colors are planned throughout the building

The "living room" on the third floor will feature vibrant carpets and a red serpentine sofa that seats 20.

This level will include a gift shop and coffee cart, a teen center, video collection, magazines and newspapers. It will be a place to rest up and catch up.

Any doubts that this is a different sort of library vanish in the fifth-floor "mixing chamber."

A whole floor will be devoted to what used to be called the reference desk.

But that was before there were so many ways of getting information and vast number of resources. Librarians will be available to work one-on-one with library visitors. About 130 of the library's 400 computers will be on this floor.

One of the library's unique features -- the book spiral -- was created with help from Larson, the library board member.

Remember the Dewey Decimal system? The non-fiction collection will take a new twist in the new library. Books will be arranged in a continuous spiral that will ramp up four levels. To make it even handier, the elevator buttons include the Dewey Decimal stops.

On top of it all is the reading room, where the ceiling soars 40 feet overhead in some places. There will be walnut-colored wood floors, views of Elliott Bay and light in an atrium setting.

"The whole thing just feels very energetic, inside and outside," said Alexandra Harris, capital program director for the library.

BY THE NUMBERS

Seattle's new library by the numbers:

$165 million -- cost of the project, including furniture and $10 million to rent the temporary library location at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center.
$77.5 million -- the amount raised by the Seattle Public Library Foundation for better furniture, the best technology and enhancements to the collection.
1.4 million -- books the new library can hold on its shelves.
18,400 -- cubic yards of concrete poured to build the library.
9,994 -- pieces of exterior glass.
4,644 -- tons of steel.
400 -- computers for public use.
328 -- employees at the new central library.
275 -- seats in the auditorium.
143 -- underground parking spaces.
11 -- floors.

© 1998-2004 Seattle Post-Intelligencer

[Kris]

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/k...ttle/index.htm

[Kris]

Monday, Apr. 19, 2004

One For The Books

A new public library by REM KOOLHAAS is surprising and bold. It comes just in time for the troubled architect

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.

Copyright © 2004 Time Inc.


Going Dutch

[Kris]

May 16, 2004

The Library That Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco

By HERBERT MUSCHAMP


A photograph of Rem Koolhaas's new Central Library in Seattle.


The irregular, and seemingly arbitrary, angles and shapes of the Seattle Central Library, and its dazzling surface, don't come at the cost of functionality.

Slide Show: Interior of the Seattle Public Library

Slide Show: Following Koolhaas's Program

AT a dark hour, Seattle's new Central Library is a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon. If an American city can erect a civic project as brave as this one, the sun hasn't set on the West. In more than 30 years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review. I could go on piling up superlatives like cars in a multiple collision, but take my word: there's going to be a whole lot of rubbernecking going on.

The new library, which opens next Sunday, was designed by Rem Koolhaas/OMA of the Netherlands in collaboration with the Seattle firm LMN Architects. Joshua Ramus of OMA was the partner in charge. It is the centerpiece of an ambitious initiative to revamp and expand Seattle's library system citywide. This is Seattle, don't forget: a city where fortunes have been made on the premise that books, and even cities, may be rendered obsolete by digital technology. Yet this new library sets an example for cities nationwide.

What cities need most of all are strong clients, like Deborah L. Jacobs, Seattle's city librarian. This is a client who knows exactly what she wants. Terrifying. But there's never been a great building without a strong client in the history of the world, and Ms. Jacobs is now up there with popes and princes as an instigator of fabulous cities.

Her achievement is all the more remarkable in light of Seattle's nasty encounters with architecture in recent years. The Seattle Art Museum, designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, is a rancid piece of work. Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project looks like something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over and died. With a record like that, it is understandable that the proposal for the library aroused fierce local opposition.

It shows strength of character that Ms. Jacobs and her supporters persisted with their vision: a spiraling space for a growing number of books; a centralized area for the librarians to help patrons. The $196.4 million capital plan, known as Libraries for All, was approved by voters in 1998. In addition to the new Central Library, the measure provided for the construction of five branch libraries and the overhauling of an additional 22.

Client fortitude is expressed by the Central Library's design. Quite apart from its strengths in structure, form and space, the building exemplifies Rem Koolhaas's reliance on the architectural program: the organization of space according to use and function. Because of the clarity of this example, the Central Library's impact on architecture could be profound. It makes art out of the relationship between architect and client.

The first impression is pure bling-bling: an urban montage of starburst images without a special lens. With a faceted exterior of glass and steel, this is a big rock candy mountain of a building, twinkling in the middle of office buildings. The library occupies a full city block, bounded by Fourth and Fifth Avenues and Spring and Madison Streets. Seattle's federal courthouse is across the street. A striking Miesian office tower rises on the opposite side. It's a fantastic location.

The library's exterior is an angular composition of folded planes. Walls are of glass, supported by a diagonal grid of light blue metal that covers almost the entire surface. At first glance, the irregular angles, folds and shapes seem arbitrary. The building's structure is hard to discern, and the overall grid pattern looks like a perverse exaggeration of the abstract geometries used by mid-20th-century architects for decorative relief.

Ages ago, Mr. Koolhaas used to stay at the U.N. Plaza Hotel in Manhattan, Kevin Roche's crisp variation on the International Style, and on approaching the library for the first time it occurred to me that Mr. Koolhaas had turned the hotel inside-out. The exterior resembles an inverted, Expressionist version of the Ambassador Grill, the hotel's ground-floor restaurant. The Zagat Survey describes the restaurant's design as a "mirrored-disco look" that "needs updating." Exactly. Who knew that dated disco bling-bling makes an ideal motif for a 21st-century library?

More to the point, who but Mr. Koolhaas knows how to embrace such campy themes and transform them into serious urbanism? This has been a constant in his work for 30 years. Pop Art is one of his roots. Fortunately, there are others. Anybody can put a pair of mouse ears on a building and proclaim his or her love for the people. Not everyone can pump up disco décor toward a new plateau in the art of making cities.

Nor can just anyone make the plateau seem like a natural progression from what has gone before. Beyond that, Mr. Koolhaas has long been motivated by the desire to counter the oedipal impulse that pervades his profession, tending to emphasize continuity over rupture. This is evident not only in his frequent allusions to modern architects like Mies van der Rohe and Wallace K. Harrison, but in his affinity with the work of Venturi and Scott Brown. Ancient Greek temples, you'll recall, were originally painted with loud colors. Athens was altogether bling-bling.

A Koolhaas building is always engrossed in conversation with its place in history as well as urban space. You'll want to walk around the library a few times before plunging in. The site is steeply raked. This plays tricks with the eyes, making it nearly impossible to register the building's scale accurately. Its four elevations are different; the profile changes constantly. Tapered facets create the effect of forced perspective, altering the apparent dimensions of the building envelope. Planes that initially look rectangular are seen on closer inspection to be trapezoidal. Why?

There are, in fact, logical reasons for these seemingly capricious moves, but they do not disclose themselves until you are inside the building, and then only gradually.

Enter at the top of the slope, on the library's Fifth Avenue side, for the building to make the grandest possible entrance into your mind. There's another entrance at the bottom, on the Fourth Avenue side, but it appears scaled for schoolchildren. (Though what kind of adult would deprive a child of the memory of a spectacular encounter with space?)

Eat your heart out, I. M. Pei. Compared to the Central Library's soaring atrium lobby, the entrance pyramid at the Louvre looks like a gadget from the Sharper Image catalog. The atrium extends along the southern half of the building. Walking through is like walking a gangplank, or stepping out onto a high diving board. At the far end, you find yourself gazing down to the sidewalk through the glass underside of an overhang.

If you were inside the building, you could just wander, letting your feet find their way intuitively through this precisely calibrated index of sophisticated spaces. Since you're not, please consult the graphics on this page and Page 1. They illustrate the process through which the architects translated their architectural program into design.

Aesthetics have entered into the design of the building at the earliest stages of planning, in other words, before the purely visual decisions have been made. It is pointless, with this project, to separate formal and social organization. How people use a space is no less a matter of form than the most abstract visual composition. As such, a building program can be subject to aesthetic articulation.

This is the meaning of the Central Library. It thinks its way beyond our dualistic tendency to polarize social and aesthetic values. Who says we need to take sides? The interplay between them can be beautiful.

One of the platforms, called the Books Spiral, epitomizes the Koolhaas approach. Designed to place roughly 75 percent of the library's collection in accessible, open space, this is the largest of the five platforms. It is a continuous, square ramp, four levels in height, that provides ease and clarity of circulation as well as storage for books. Koolhaas fans will recognize this feature from an unbuilt library he designed in the early 1990's for the Jussieu campus of the University of Paris on the Left Bank. Some critics thought the spiral concept defied gravity, common sense and safety. As realized, it is an entirely pragmatic solution to a common institutional problem: how to accommodate an expanding collection of books without having to divide particular fields of information over more than one floor. The concrete ramp looks expensive but wasn't. The form was fabricated using parking lot construction technology. You'll love it if you're in a wheelchair.

I'm not suggesting that the spiral design was driven purely by pragmatics, only that it serves pragmatic needs. Spirals and pinwheels have long figured in Mr. Koolhaas's architecture, for reasons that have as much to do with historical memory and psychology as with practical dictates. The point is elegance of mind. Social, technical and psychological goals are fused into comprehensible form. The fusion is where the art takes shape.

Another example: the Mixing Chamber. This is the heart of the library, the platform where librarians greet readers and help them locate books. It feels like the deck of a big ship. In a conventional library, you would expect to find this service on a lower floor. But we know from other projects that Mr. Koolhaas likes to "displace the positions," as he puts it. His proposed expansion of the Whitney Museum of American Art would have situated the entrance lobby halfway between the street and the top floor levels. The Mixing Chamber flaunts a similar distaste for convention. In actuality, its unusual placement ensures a far more efficient use of staff time, since they will be in a centralized location.

Stairs and escalators — vertical circulation — are painted bright chartreuse, except for a grand staircase that leads, through a mouthlike opening, to the public meeting rooms. These stairs are painted a yummy lipstick red, as are the cavernous corridors off which the meeting rooms open. We have, it seems, entered the body politic with a good deal of passion.

Other vignettes: carpeted flooring by Petra Blaisse. Vegetation motifs, leaves and grasses, a glimpse of paradise, but slightly toxic. A corner of the Mixing Chamber, with a view so vertiginous that you want to scream. But it's a library, so you can't. Views upward toward the black undersides of the platforms, as if you're gazing up into a building from where a basement used to be before it was washed out to sea.

Mr. Koolhaas's attitude toward the architectural program recalls Louis Kahn's relationship to a building's plumbing, the ducts and pipes that he sometimes refused to conceal. Kahn professed to hate the plumbing, but claimed that the pipes would ruin his building if he didn't allow them visible expression. Likewise, by making the building out of the organizational requirements, Mr. Koolhaas prevents them from interfering with his architecture. By making his clients' needs fundamental to his aesthetic, he neutralizes their capacity to ruin his effects.

Mr. Koolhaas's attitude toward structure is similarly ambivalent. You will see several structural systems at work in the library. They are brought into coherent visual harmony only intermittently. Oh, look, some crossbracing. Over there, fat columns thrust up and inward at an assortment of splayed angles, like the trunks of some exotic tree.

Lovers of Venetian Gothic architecture may suspect that Mr. Koolhaas has revived the quality that John Ruskin called savageness or rudeness. If they needed to illuminate a council chamber in the Doge's Palace, they punched a window in the wall. Never mind if it didn't line up with other windows, or shattered the symmetry of the facade. Contingency had its own aesthetic charms.

Such buildings are narratives. We did this, and then we did that. And it may be useful to see the Central Library as a series of episodes in urban space. There are crowd scenes and moments of intense solitary absorption. Intense vertigo gives way to erotic stimulation. Over here, you're an actor, over there a spectator. Don't look now, but the library could be reading you.

Ruskin, a romantic, was deeply engaged with the emotional content of buildings as well as with their place in the social scheme of things. He's a useful figure to think back upon from the perspective of today, when much of our most vital architecture is parked at the intersection of psychoanalysis and political science.

The Central Library will appeal to those who suspect that the subconscious may be more exact — more rational, in fact — than the faculty of conscious reasoning. If you've ever waked up with the solution to a problem that defeated you the night before, you will feel at home in this building. So will anyone who wants to know where architecture is going.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

HIGH-TECH BIBLIOPHILIA

by PAUL GOLDBERGER

Rem Koolhaas’s new library in Seattle is an ennobling public space.

Issue of 2004-05-24
Posted 2004-05-17

If you wanted to build a new library downtown somewhere, Rem Koolhaas is probably the last architect you would think to hire. For years, Koolhaas has been ranting about how traditional cities don’t matter anymore, and how the rise of new technologies has made public space obsolete, and how when people leave their houses the only thing they want to do is shop. His firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, which is based in Rotterdam, wasn’t on the original list of architects being considered for a new library in Seattle, but one day in 1999 Koolhaas’s partner, Joshua Ramus, who comes from Seattle, got a phone call from his mother saying she had read in the local newspaper that any architect who wanted to be considered should show up the next day for a briefing. Ramus rushed to the airport, flew to Seattle, and eventually the firm got the job.

The result is the most important new library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating. Koolhaas has always been a better architect than social critic, and the building conveys a sense of the possibility, even the urgency, of public space in the center of a city. The design is not so much a rejection of traditional monumentality as a reinterpretation of it, and it celebrates the culture of the book as passionately, in its way, as does the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The Seattle building is thrilling from top to bottom. Koolhaas and Ramus started out by investigating how libraries actually work, and how they are likely to change. They went with Deborah Jacobs, Seattle’s chief librarian, and several trustees and staff members to look at libraries around the country, and then they held a series of seminars about the future of the book with scholars and representatives of Microsoft, Amazon, M.I.T.’s Media Lab, and other organizations. They concluded, not surprisingly, that people are not ready to give up on books and that they are not ready to give up on libraries, but that they find most libraries stuffy, confusing, and uninviting. Patrons wanted a more user-friendly institution, and librarians wanted one that was more flexible, and would not require constant rearrangement as collections expanded.

The architects saw that in most older libraries, where books are stored on rows of shelves on separate floors, collections are arbitrarily broken apart, depending on the amount of space available on each floor. But since the Dewey Decimal System is a continuous series of numbers, they reasoned, why couldn’t books be stored on a continuous series of shelves? And what if the shelves wound up and up, in a spiral? They saw that it was possible to design stacks in the manner of a parking garage, with slanted floors joined in a series of zigzagging ramps. The stacks, which the architects named the Spiral, take up the equivalent of four floors in the middle of the eleven-story building. They are open, which means that you can browse. You get to the Spiral via a chartreuse-colored escalator and stairway that slices through the middle of the ramped floors. (All vertical circulation in the building, including the elevator cabs, is chartreuse.)

Above the stacks area, on the tenth floor, is a spectacular reading room, with slanted glass walls. The room has an unusual perspective on the Seattle skyline, since the library building is surrounded by skyscrapers, and the waters of Elliott Bay are visible only between the towers. The soaring glass shed is as spectacular, in its way, as the Rose Main Reading Room in the Fifth Avenue library. Just below the stacks is a room full of computers. Koolhaas calls it the Mixing Chamber, which sounds more high-tech and radical than it really is. The Mixing Chamber is simply a reinterpretation of the traditional library reference room. People who visit it are directed to the books they need. Koolhaas’s verbiage is always a little annoying. He calls an expansive, atrium-style lobby the Living Room. The Living Room is a splendid vestibule that anoints the act of reading with grandeur and civic pride, and Seattle is lucky to have it. But what Koolhaas has done here is not so different, in its way, from what Carrère & Hastings were trying to achieve when they put Astor Hall at the entrance to the New York Public Library.

I thought of the Carrère & Hastings building often as I walked through the Seattle library. Two buildings could not possibly look less alike, but both were born of a marriage of earnestness and opulence. When the library on Fifth Avenue was finished, in 1911, a grand library that was free to the public was still a fresh, almost radical notion, and the architecture was intended to give it gravitas. In the same way that McKim, Mead & White designed the original Pennsylvania Station to confer a kind of nobility on the act of entering and leaving the city, Carrère & Hastings expected the public library not only to house books but to dignify the act of seeking them out.

Koolhaas and Ramus did not pretend that the world is unchanged since 1911—a view that held sway in Chicago a few years ago when a huge new central library designed by the architect Thomas Beeby went up. It looks vaguely like a nineteenth-century train station and is overbearing and bombastic. The complex polygonal form of the Seattle library, which is sheathed almost entirely in glass set in a diamond-shaped grid, has a dazzling energy; it’s the most alluring architectural object to arrive in this city’s downtown since the Space Needle. The building manages the neat trick of seeming exotic but not bizarre. Once you have walked around the block a couple of times, it seems almost conventional. In a few years, the great glass tent will connote the appeal of reading as much as New York’s marble lions do. It’s significant that the building was put up in the land of Microsoft (and with some of the company’s money), since it is such a powerful testament to architecture as a container for the delivery of information. We don’t need big library buildings the way we once did, but if you surf the Internet at home you are just a click away from a video game. When you do it here, you feel that you are engaged in a serious pursuit. A building like this emphasizes the value a culture places on literacy. (It cost a hundred and sixty-five million dollars, most of which was paid by voter-approved city bonds.)

The library, for which the Seattle firm of LMN Architects served as associate designer, is clearly organized and will be easy to use. When Koolhaas and Ramus designed the building, they did what architects often do—they made a diagram. It was, essentially, five boxes: the book stacks were one box, the administrative offices were another, and there were boxes for staff work areas, meeting rooms, and below-ground parking. Then they did something remarkable. For all intents and purposes, they built the diagram. They sketched the boxes floating in space and placed the large public areas—the Living Room, the Mixing Chamber, and the Reading Room—above and below them, surrounded by glass. Turning a diagram into an actual architectural form seems like something of a parlor trick, not to mention being crudely indifferent to aesthetics. In fact, it was neither of these things. The building has a logic to it: functional sections are the starting point, but they are placed so that the spaces between them are large enough and spectacular enough to produce powerful architectural effects. The glass skin is thrown over the entire structure, like a blanket. The diamond pattern in the skin is actually seismic bracing, engineered to protect the building in the event of an earthquake or strong winds.

Deborah Jacobs seems to have been about as close to an ideal client as could be imagined, and she protected the architects from some of their worst instincts. She rejected the green-colored, unfinished sheetrock that they had used in other recent projects, including the Prada store in New York, on the ground that it was trite and cheap-looking. “I thought it was important that you have a sense of awe when you come into a public building, especially a library,” she said. But she had no interest in a traditional building: “This is the first library of the twenty-first century.” Jacobs analyzed every aspect of the library’s operations, and insisted that there be no compromise in accommodating them. When the library’s trustees saw Koolhaas and Ramus’s first design, they were relieved to find that the building fulfilled all the practical demands that had been set. The architects presented the building as a reinvention of the idea of the public library, which in many ways it is. Their greatest achievement, though, is not in reinventing the library but in reaffirming it.

www.newyorker.com

[Kris]

Guide


Monday, May 17, 2004, 12:31 A.M. Pacific

Avant-garde architect reinvents Seattle's new library

By Rosemarie Buchanan
Special to The Seattle Times


Rem Koolhaas photographs the new Seattle Central Library, a building he conceived and one that is capturing attention for its striking exterior and unusual interior. Koolhaas, known for his avant-garde approach and biting critiques, calls the library "really a traditional building."

Several years ago, a group of architecture graduate students had dinner with Frank Gehry. Famous for the seemingly floating metal forms of Seattle's Experience Music Project, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and his breakthrough work, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, Gehry has become the "must have" architect for cities and institutions looking to redefine themselves.

The subject of Rem Koolhaas came up, bringing a surprising response from the most popular avant-garde architect in the world today:

"Koolhaas is something," Gehry said. "His ideas. He's beyond what I'm doing. He's really something."

Yes, Koolhaas, the architect of Seattle's new Central Library, is something — something of an enigma. With a lanky 6-foot-4-inch frame, sharp cheekbones and a shaved head, the Dutch architect looks monastic. If Gehry is known for his outlandish shapes, Koolhaas is known for, as Gehry says, his ideas.

During his packed, provocative lectures, he might calmly present blizzards of research on topics such as the absurd pace of urban growth in China or the allure of shopping. He'll hit his audience with unsentimental ideas about how global trends are making architects irrelevant. He constantly reuses his favorite words — contaminate, exploit, instigate, exacerbate — to cajole architects to make themselves matter again.

Instead of being insulted, the architecture world has embraced him, made him its chief guru, despite the fact that his commissions to design actual buildings had been relatively rare until recently.

Now he has been given the chance to bring his concepts to full fruition in Seattle's new library, and his agenda is nothing less than revamping our notions of what a library is.

Breaking with convention

Perhaps no other architect today is so deft at analyzing and attacking sacred cows. Take his criticisms of the modern skyscraper: The floors of skyscrapers separate people by company, by function. The strange or the banal can all occur on one floor without having any effect at all on another. It's a giant shell containing thousands of people, yet the only thing that can possibly connect any of them is the elevator.In Koolhaas' buildings, users can watch and be watched by other users, almost like being on a stage. In other buildings, escalators, stairways and ramps are typically camouflaged or tucked away; Koolhaas brings them out front and center and uses them to force people to interconnect.

Once a journalist and screenwriter, Koolhaas' best-known work until now is not a building, but a book. "S,M,L,XL," published in 1995, was a 1,344-page, six-pound collection of built and unbuilt projects, sketches and essays, some of which have almost nothing to do with buildings. Collectively, the book amounted to a provocative joy ride of a critique of contemporary society — and not incidentally, a brilliant marketing tool for his services.

With increasing pace, his Rotterdam, Netherlands-based architectural firm, Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has gotten more work, after two decades of doing not much more than architectural-competition entries, supremely clever but unrealized studies and the occasional built project.

In 1995, Koolhaas became a Harvard professor. In 2000, he won the Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Pulitzer. In the past eight years he has built in Europe, Asia, New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and here. OMA's drawing board includes a theater in Dallas and a new headquarters for China Cable Television in Beijing.

A generation ago, recently minted architects sought out the firm Skidmore, Owings and Merrill for a year or two of buffing; today, architecture-school graduates would give their left arm to become an acolyte to Koolhaas.

The library of the future

When the Seattle Library Board of Trustees picked Koolhaas to design the building in 1999, they cited his "intellectual approach to the library of the future." The realization of that approach looks like this: Most of the 11-story space of the new library feels like one continuous volume, subdivided into interconnected platforms that freely flow from one to the other.

Moving around it is not unlike playing the classic video game "Super Mario Bros.," jumping from one level to the next. Your path can be straightforward or labyrinthine, depending upon your route. The nonfiction collection's "book spiral" winds through the building on a continuous series of ramps, allowing the disabled and able-bodied to cruise the stacks.

"There is a kind of sadness about the (traditional) multi-storied library," Koolhaas said. "It is simply divided into floors and each floor is more or less a random grouping of subjects, like humanities, whatever ... (We wanted to) have a single, continuous experience, making individual floors almost mute, and that's why we came up with a spiral."

The new library also questions assumptions about materials. Rip-stop nylon, a parachute-like material, lines one of its ceilings. The metal "fishnet" pattern on the exterior, engineered by the structural firm Arup Partners, actually supports the building against lateral forces (such as those caused by earthquakes). That's in contrast to most large buildings, which internalize most of their support in central cores.

Also out are terms like "reference desk." Here it's called the "mixing chamber," a one-stop shop for both in-depth and reference information that's also the gateway to the book spiral.

"We were just interested to reinvent the vocabulary so it would not be conveying this kind of endless tradition that was running to its conclusion," Koolhaas said. "If you mention in one sentence 'reference desk' and 'mixing chamber,' the one sounds uninspiring, and the other one sounds as if something is about to happen."

Koolhaas used similar ideas to unify once-scattered campus functions and revitalize the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) with his McCormick Tribune Campus Center, completed earlier this year.

The center's one-story building envelops a square block and swallows an existing campus building — one designed by modernist icon Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, also the former head of the IIT architecture school.

Koolhaas turned that entire building into a cafeteria, typically thumbing his nose at notions of high art, low art and function. Diagonal pathways cut through the center and extend outside, disrupting the abstract, neat grids that Mies designed the campus around in 1938.

A 'traditional' building?

Koolhaas' theories might imply that, like IIT, his ambitions for the library extend beyond its walls.

Look at the essay, "Bigness, or the problem of Large," from "S,M,L,XL." Written to defend another, unbuilt library project five times the size of Seattle's, "Bigness" defines a building so large that it breaks "with scale, with architectural composition, with tradition, with transparency, with ethics. Bigness is no longer part of any urban tissue. Its subtext is (expletive deleted) context."

In other words, the building becomes so large and difficult to grasp that the city has to adapt to it, not the other way around.

So is Rem Koolhaas coming to Seattle and saying we need to adapt to him and his Bigness? Koolhaas says emphatically, no.

"Seattle's library is not that size and is really a traditional building. (It) takes into account two kinds of context: One, the fact that it's in an American city, which means largely abstract-looking and largely featureless buildings, and, second, within its precise position, it is trying to exploit the maximum natural givens of the site."

That's how far-out Koolhaas is: He thinks one of the most radical civic buildings ever erected in this country is "traditional."

Ironically, the world's leading architectural theorist is reluctant to explain his new work in too much detail. Some things simply beg for explanation, like the giant bulge that hovers over a stairwell on the library's bright red, so-called "colon" or meeting-room floor.

"The architect, in terms of telling you why things are, has its own limitations," Koolhaas said.

Maybe by retaining some mystery Koolhaas forestalls the day when his work becomes too easily understood and commodified. Unlike Gehry, who some say is already down that path, there isn't yet a well-known Koolhaas "look." For now, Koolhaas cultivates a sharp edge.

Rosemarie Buchanan is a Redmond-based architecture writer; rosemarie.buchanan@earthlink.net

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

[Kris]

Rem Roars Back

[krulltime]

Wow...what a great building. I really want to visit next time I got to seattle. :P

[TonyO]

Here are some pics from my recent visit to the new library:




The space inside is very open with a lot of light, which is important in Seattle since it is often overcast.


There are many cubicles with internet access.






These red pictures are from the conference room floor.

[Jimbo Holland]

another beautiful building of rem koolhaas:



the dutch embassy in berlin

[Jimbo Holland]

go to

www.oma.nl

Office of Metropolian Architecture

[TonyO]

Wall St. Journal
1/13/2005

A Glass Sculpture With a Library Inside

Seattle -- Were it not for its eccentric exterior -- which makes it look as if thousands of panes of diamond-shaped glass are in danger of falling into the site, or collapsing onto the street -- no one would be writing about the new Seattle Central Library. There is something viscerally disorienting (and at the same time tremendously exciting, like an amusement-park thrill ride) about a $165 million building that seems in imminent danger of falling down.

In an attempt to describe its external aspect (which is visible from all four sides, since it occupies a whole city block), one leaps to complex metaphors. A cubistically hacked, nonmelting iceberg. A stiff tent of glass thrown over an unevenly stacked pile of books. The exterior is made up of at least 28 planes -- triangular, trapezoidal, even rectangular -- most of them leaning at angles away from the horizontal or vertical, some of them projecting far out over those below. Most of these joined-together planes are composed of four-by- seven-foot diamond-paned layers of glass enclosed in a steel grid, surfaced on the outside by shiny aluminum.

It's a transparent metal and glass sculpture with a building inside -- a building you can see (when the light is right) through this dazzling transparent wrapping. At a blow, the architect Rem Koolhaas of OMA, in collaboration with lots of other people, has dissolved and reshaped our notions of what a building can be. The walls are the roofs, and most of the floors seem to have nothing to do with either.

It pleases me that the most exciting new American building I've ever reviewed is a free, downtown public library open to all. Anyone sober is welcome to the Seattle Central Library, which opened last May. Eight-thousand-plus people drop by every day: toddlers, teenagers, tourists, schoolteachers, serious researchers, people who come to read magazines and newspapers, ordinary folk looking for information or a good book, homeless people looking for warmth. All are supremely well served.

Once you penetrate the angular glass iceberg (there are entrances on both Fourth and Fifth avenues, two floors apart in hilly Seattle), you come gradually to realize how well the whole thing works -- although it may take a couple of visits to master the terrain.

The architects divided up the functions of a big 21st-century urban public library (book storage, reference and computers, book handling, administration, reading rooms, etc.) and gave to each function its own floor or floors. The heart of the building -- the books -- is located in a four-floor box on levels six to nine, which read from the outside as broad rectangular bands braced by giant X's behind the glass skin. Inside, these levels hold 75% of the library's nonfiction collection in hospitably open stacks.

A very gradually sloping corridor -- the Book Spiral -- makes its way around all four levels in one continuous run, like the access ramps in multilevel parking garages. (It's an easy push for a wheelchair, I can attest.) Embedded in the sloping concrete floor are removable rubber mats identifying the catalog numbers of the books in the shelves alongside, which are widely separated and evenly lighted. Each of these levels also contains information desks, public computers, reading tables, copy machines, and special amenities like piano and performance practice rooms, adjacent to books on music and drama.

But finding, borrowing and reading books are only a few of the things people do in public libraries nowadays, when so much of our information comes from sources other than the printed page. Level five, a broad platform below the book stacks (aluminum floor, angled columns left half-unsheathed, sparkly black ceiling), is the place one might go to begin a search. It contains not only the usual reference books but 132 of the Seattle Central Library's 400 public computers (almost every one in use, the day I was there), as well as a team of roving reference librarians who can talk to their colleagues throughout the building via wireless transmitters around their necks.

Look up a subject, author or title on the computerized catalog and you may find not only an image of the item you want but a map indicating its location in the building. These computers also link users with the Internet, chatting librarians and a number of useful databases. If you don't know how to use these gizmos, staff members will help you or direct you to in-house classes, which are conducted in several languages. For some reason, this facility -- which would be called a Reference Room anywhere else -- has been labeled the "Mixing Chamber."

But the Book Spiral and the Mixing Chamber are only twoof many specialized spaces, organized on what appear to be floating floors inside the glass tent. At the lowest level (over underground parking for 143 cars -- two of which may be electrics, charging their batteries as they park) is the 275-seat Microsoft Auditorium. Donations from several Seattle-area corporations and individuals are acknowledged in such "naming opportunities."

Alongside it is a large (15,000-square-foot), colorful children's library -- so far underused -- with its own minicomputers, low poufs to sit on, and a cozy storytelling cabin in one corner. The prize of level one is the ESL/World Languages Center, dedicated to serving the city's large non-English-speaking population. It includes not only classrooms and one-on-one tutorial booths for language instruction, as well as tapes, discs, films, books and periodicals in many languages, but also 7,200 square feet of pale maple flooring carved into reversed, low-relief letters in 11 languages, spelling out the opening words of 556 classic texts -- a site-specific work of art by Ann Hamilton.

The library also commissioned two compelling works of digital art: A 19-minute video loop of computer-generated, as if pencil-drawn objects ever-receding in space is the work of local wizard Gary Hill, projected on a wall of the eight-floor atrium; a series of whispering 3-D faces by Tony Oursler wink at you from holes punched in the walls alongside as you ride up or down the bright yellow escalator.

All the vertical circulation elements -- escalators, elevators and stairs -- are colored this same bright, green-tinted yellow, supposedly to help people find them, possibly because the architect liked the color. Similar color-coding, wild supergraphics and changing LED signs provide other navigational aids. The corridors of level four -- a small, cantilevered level of community meeting rooms -- are curving, shiny and painted (floor, wall and ceiling) in a variety of bright lipstick reds and magentas, like enlarged aortas. This is one clear instance of the client giving Mr. Koolhaas his expressionistic lead. "It could be painted over at some point," concedes librarian Deborah Jacobs, who admits she doesn't like the red tubing any more than I do. Ms. Jacobs is a very savvy, tough-minded client, at least as responsible for the final product as Mr. Koolhaas and his colleagues.

I haven't even mentioned the vast, multicolored level-three "Living Room" -- fiction and new titles, Starbucks Teen Center, magazines and newspapers, rolling coffee cart (you can drink in the stacks!) and a tiny gift shop that closes up after hours like an accordion. Much of this lies atop some spectacular green garden-like carpets by Mr. Koolhaas's girlfriend Petra Blaisse. Or the quiet, no less spectacular level-10 reading room, with its 40-foot-peak ceiling, the culmination of all those acres of diamond-patterned glass.

My ultimate point is not only that everything inside the glazed, giddy exterior works; but also that the apparently irrational planes of the glass tent were determined by at least semirational decisions of where to locate the floors inside. Some of the more outrageous cantilevers (notably that of level 11, administration, which suddenly leaps 28 feet beyond the building below) probably just signify an architect being outrageous. But most of the mismatched floors make sense in their own right, and lead to that strange draping of 217,000 square feet of glass curtain wall between their edges.

One result is that almost anywhere you find yourself inside the building, you have around you great sloping reaches of these magnificent glass walls, which can be either elegantly opaque and protective or astonishingly transparent, incorporating into your experience neighboring buildings, distant mountains, and container ships easing down Elliott Bay between slits in the Seattle skyline.

---

Mr. Littlejohn covers art and culture on the West Coast for the Journal.

[Kris]

DER SPIEGEL 13/2006 - March 27, 2006
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/...408748,00.html

SPIEGEL Interview with Dutch Architect Rem Koolhaas

"Evil Can also Be Beautiful"

Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas talks about Prada and politics, building in autocratic states and the allure of the ugly.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Koolhaas, you plan to enter politics as a socialist. Doesn't being a working top architect keep you busy enough?

Koolhaas: I'm not interested in going into politics in the classic sense, but why shouldn't I, if I can do something useful? There are so many unresolved questions, and in my view politicians are not up to the challenge. I don't intend to help out as an individual, but rather with my entire firm, OMA, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, and my think tank, AMO.

SPIEGEL: What is a socialist like you doing designing shops for fashion house Prada and its world of luxury?

Koolhaas: Do the old-fashioned socialists you are apparently referring to even exist anymore? I'm pleased to have Prada as a client that is moving today's culture forward. I like fashion, whether or not it's overpriced, because it creates a sense of the sublime with relatively few means. Where else do you find that?

SPIEGEL: What connects architecture with politics?

Koolhaas: All important architecture of the last century was strongly influenced by political systems. Look at the Soviet system, with its constructivism and Stalinism, Weimer with its Modern style, Mussolini and, of course, the Nazis and Albert Speer's colossal structures.

SPIEGEL: And the present?

Koolhaas: Today's architecture is subservient to the market and its terms. The market has supplanted ideology. Architecture has turned into a spectacle. It has to package itself and no longer has significance as anything but a landmark.

SPIEGEL: You also criticize yourself with statements like those. Your television center in Beijing, the CCTV Tower for the Central Chinese Television network, will change the city and give it a new face.

Koolhaas: One cannot completely avoid this landmark character with large buildings such as these. But the city itself is also gigantic. Working on this project at this location and for these people gives the building a powerful sense of content and, as a result, a great deal of seriousness.

SPIEGEL: Do national peculiarities still play a role in architecture these days?

Koolhaas: There are essentially two possibilities. One is to be, shall we say, an average architect and do the same thing everywhere. The other is to let yourself be inspired and even changed by the unique qualities of the place where you're building. We always try to take the second approach. As far as I'm concerned, our CCTV in China is inconceivable in another location and, of course, cannot be duplicated.

SPIEGEL: You often criticize fellow architects like Frank Gehry, with his stacked metal designs, and purist I.M. Pei for not being serious enough. Why?

Koolhaas: I don't criticize them. I merely try to put as much distance as possible between them and me. I find their approach unsatisfying. I don't believe that every ambition has to be expressed in steel, glass or concrete.

SPIEGEL: These architects are very successful.

Koolhaas: That's fine. But Gehry, to focus on him for a moment, would never be asked about his political views. On the other hand, our firm AMO has worked for the European Union in Brussels. We tried to make the EU's political message clearer, more attractive and easier to communicate.

SPIEGEL: So architects should have a social and political conscience?

Koolhaas: It certainly doesn't do any good, but I'm old-fashioned enough to believe that that's true and to look for this conscience.

SPIEGEL: Sociologists have assigned part of the blame for the recent riots in the French suburbs to failed architectural concepts. Are they right?

Koolhaas: The architecture per se isn't at fault. The more important factor, in my view, is the political neglect of these areas, which have essentially been cut off from other neighborhoods.

SPIEGEL: Berlin painter Heinrich Zille, whose work often portrayed the poor, said that one can kill a person with an apartment as effectively as with an ax.

Koolhaas: Let's put it this way: One can be happy or unhappy in a building. But some buildings make us more depressed than others.

SPIEGEL: One of the goals of the Bauhaus movement was to design an antidote to the gloom of tenement housing. Does the motto "form follows function" still apply today?

Koolhaas: It was always more of a slogan than a program. I don't think anyone believes in it anymore. I see many superfluous things in design today. It may be that the pendulum will swing back and the austere esthetic will return.

SPIEGEL: You are also an author. Can architecture be compared to a story, a novel or even a poem?

Koolhaas: Yes. I used to write screenplays for Russ Meyer?

SPIEGEL: ... who became famous for his sex films starring large-breasted women.

Koolhaas: In a script, you have to link various episodes together, you have to generate suspense and you have to assemble things -- through editing, for example. It's exactly the same in architecture. Architects also put together spatial episodes to make sequences.

SPIEGEL: Tell us about "Hollywood Tower," the script you wrote for Russ Meyer.

Koolhaas: I wrote it in 1974 with Rene Daalder, and it consists of three levels. At the first level, wealthy Arabs buy up the Hollywood film archive and build a computer with which any star can be put back on the screen. The second level deals with the Nixon administration, which spends a fortune helping out-of-work actors -- including Lassie -- get jobs in the movies again. Finally, the third level is about Russ Meyer, of course, who is shooting a porn film -- the last form of humanism.

SPIEGEL: This potential masterpiece was never finished.

Koolhaas: Fassbinder and other directors were our influences at the time. Unfortunately, Meyer didn't think it was the right material for him.

SPIEGEL: Architecture seems easier in this respect.

Koolhaas: That's what you think! It comes with similar frustrations.

SPIEGEL: What are some of the things that have happened to you?

Koolhaas: EuroDisney, near Paris, is a case in point. In the early 1990s, we, together with other leading architecture firms, such as Peter Eisenman and Jean Nouvel, were invited to take part in a competition. The whole thing turned out to be a tragic experience of what architecture means today and how creativity is dealt with. One day, during the vacation period, we were all summoned to the Hotel Georg V in Paris to meet with Michael Eisner, Disney's chairman at the time. It turned out that several different architects had been scheduled to appear at the same building on the hotel grounds. It was awkward. Once we had all presented our proposals, Eisner met privately with his two American senior architects. After long consideration, the two architects told their boss: "Michael, we believe that the Europeans out there are harming the idea of Disney." We were all promptly fired. That's capitalism in a democracy.

SPIEGEL: Doesn't it trouble you to be working in countries like China and Dubai, which are not democratic, but autocratic?

Koolhaas: It's controversial, of course. But what's the alternative? Hospitals and kindergartens are OK, but a building for Chinese television is a bad thing? I see it differently. If we get involved with a country like this, we should be involved in the important matters, not the unimportant ones. Before we take on a project, we take a close look at the situation in the country. As a professor at Harvard, I have spent more than ten years carefully studying the direction in which China is developing. I'm convinced that it'll be positive in the end.

SPIEGEL: Is it easier to work in these types of countries than in excessively bureaucratic democracies?

Koolhaas: That's what I thought at the beginning. But precisely the opposite is the case. Working in these countries is unbelievably methodical, slow and by the book.

SPIEGEL: In methodical Germany, a major debate is currently underway in Berlin over whether to rebuild or start from scratch. Is tearing down the Palace of the Republic the right thing to do, and should the reconstructed Hohenzollern palace (which East German authorities demolished in 1950) really be erected in its place?

Koolhaas: I think tearing down the palace is a crime, simply because it was a special, recognizable artifact of a past political system. In my view, Berlin is nothing but a collection of overlapping regimes. It's unhealthy in a historical sense to eradicate this characteristic building.

SPIEGEL: But the palace was ugly.

Koolhaas: Ugliness also has a right to exist. Our society can no longer tolerate ugliness. You see that in cars, sofas and women. But seriously, if something like this building is ugly but nevertheless important, we must preserve it.

SPIEGEL: And if it had been beautiful and important? Shouldn't architects be the prophets of beauty?

Koolhaas: Beauty isn't what I'm primarily interested in. I think appropriateness is more important.

SPIEGEL: What do you think is the world's most beautiful building?

Koolhaas: Very conventionally, the Pantheon in Rome, for example. Isn't it remarkable? Talk about beauty and you get boring answers, but talk about ugliness and things get interesting.

SPIEGEL: What are the greatest architectural sins?

Koolhaas: Evil has many faces. It can also arise both from inability or from malicious intentions.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that evil and ugliness are the same thing?

Koolhaas: Not necessarily. Evil can also be beautiful. The Coliseum in Rome, for example, a wonderful structure with an awful past. Just think about the bloody gladiator fights there.

SPIEGEL: You were born in 1944 in Rotterdam, a city the Germans almost completely destroyed.

Koolhaas: Only the downtown area. We were lucky, because we lived in a modern glass building on the outskirts, and the 1944/45 winter was incredibly cold, but sunny. We had no heat, so my parents put me on the balcony, where I was almost burned to a crisp by the sun, but I survived. In my opinion, Rotterdam is one of the capitals of European architecture, and that's certainly only the case because it was destroyed. Destruction can be very stimulating.

SPIEGEL: When did you first dream of becoming an architect?

Koolhaas: I never really dreamed of it. But when I was 24, I was walking down the street one day and had a kind of vision that I should become an architect.

SPIEGEL: Some people say that if architects had to live in their own buildings, cities would be more attractive today.

Koolhaas: Oh, come on now, that's really trivial.

SPIEGEL: Where do you live?

Koolhaas: That's unimportant. It's less a question of architecture than of finances.

SPIEGEL: You're avoiding the question. Where do you live?

Koolhaas: OK, I live in a Victorian apartment building in London.

SPIEGEL: And you're asking Berliners to put up with their view of the Palace of the Republic.

Koolhaas: My generation is the first to experience its professional life colliding with globalization. We're accustomed to seeing everything within a global context. That's another reason why I believe it's a bad idea to eliminate the palace from Berlin. They could just as well have removed the Reichstag.

SPIEGEL: Another argument that has prevailed in Berlin is that the historical downtown area must be revived. What will cities look like in the future? Do we even need such downtown areas?

Koolhaas: The old contrast between downtown and suburban areas is outdated.

SPIEGEL: Wait a minute, isn't the current trend moving away from suburbia and back to the city?

Koolhaas: Yes, for now. And do you know what's so ironic about that? The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety -- dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull.

SPIEGEL: Demographers predict that the world's population will continue growing until 2050 and begin shrinking after that. What does this mean?

Koolhaas: Architect Oswald Mathias Ungers and I have already come up with the theory that it will be just as important to plan for the decline of cities as for new construction in them. Look at Berlin. There have been all kinds of construction there, but many of its buildings are vacant.

SPIEGEL: What do you learn from that?

Koolhaas: I'm currently working on an expansion of the famous Hermitage in St. Petersburg, scheduled for completion in 2014. In that case, we are using existing old buildings for the museum. There will be no new construction. That's unheard of for an architect, don't you think?

SPIEGEL: Is there a building that you still want to build?

Koolhaas: No. The beauty of my profession lies in its randomness and surprise. And don't think I can choose my projects. I have to build what's offered to me.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Koolhaas, thank you for this interview.

The interview was conducted by editors Matthias Matussek and Joachim Kronsbein.

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