Contemporary architectural marvel or parking garage filled with books? What you think of the new Central Library will largely depend on your relationship to the building. To a citizen of the Seattle area interested in art and architecture, it is an audacious piece that highlights our power as a center for technology and culture. To someone wishing to use the library, it is an irritating facility with a confusing floor plan replete with unpleasant interior design elements.
This grand, unusable library is in some ways an apt symbol for the history of libraries in the Western world. Our public libraries are a legacy of distinctly different movements in the 15th and 18th centuries. The Renaissance opened the hearts and minds of men to learning. Private libraries, publishing, scientific research, translation, and scholarship of all kinds grew exponentially. Alas, most all of the libraries of this period were private and the average citizen, generally illiterate in any case, had no access. The spirit of the Renaissance was to collect books and display them ostentatiously. Large libraries represented wealth, knowledge and power. The often indifferently educated owners of libraries also built huge estates, had stables filled with the finest horses, and indulged in every possible form of conspicuous consumption to announce their power, wealth, and taste. The Michelangelo-designed Laurentian library built in the 1500s is a great example of the Renaissance ideal. Impressive in scale, materials, and design it houses relatively few volumes in a tremendous amount of expensively appointed space. Indeed, all of the volumes of the original library could have been comfortably shelved in a large garage. Powerful Renaissance figures were not interested in efficiency. The owners of early libraries demonstrated their power and intellect through scale and style. Grandness was the order of the day and Michelangelo’s library delivers.
The new Seattle Central Library is certainly on a grand scale. A showpiece building, it announces in Renaissance style: “Look, Seattle has arrived. We are rich, we are powerful, and we have taste and discernment.” Self-consciously cosmopolitan, the Library is an example of the international architecture scene. Nothing in the building’s design suggests ‘Seattle’ or ‘Pacific Northwest.’ In a region noted for its natural environment, wood production and seafaring, the Library features no views of the outside world, no sense of the ocean and not an exposed wood beam in the building. From a Renaissance standpoint, there is little to quibble with here. Paul Goldberger, in an oft seen quote, has said, “The most important library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating.” The building has also won a Time magazine architectural award. KPBS actually ran a documentary on the library’s architectural splendor prior to its opening for use. Impressive praise indeed.
A second tradition of libraries followed from the upheavals of the French Revolution and the spread of Enlightenment ideals. An expanding middle class, increased political suffrage and a dramatic expansion in public literacy led to the notion of a civic library. Funded in part or in whole by public monies, these libraries would be for the newly educated public bent on self-improvement. Literacy leads to enlightenment and enlightenment to a better world. The more books that could be circulated to the general populous the better. This second heritage moves us to provide everyone with access to our libraries. The Boston Public Library, America’s earliest large public library, represents the new ideal quite well while not ignoring the Renaissance tradition. The central reading room is grand by any measure but includes much greater room for reading and, more importantly, a system of shelving and cataloguing that gives the maximum number of people easy access to as many works as possible. Consciously designed as a palace for the masses, the library encourages study and reflection while celebrating man’s inherent nobility. For the first time, the public was being invited into the world of reading, scholarship, and ideas. The new Seattle Central Library founders on the public.
Well and good for Paul Goldberger to praise the architecture, but he is unlikely to check out a book. And one suspects the editors of Time magazine are not going to spend a great deal of time perusing the stacks. The trouble starts if you actually want to check out a book. When you want thousands of users to access tens of thousands of volumes, you need an interior layout that is intuitive. Yet, the interior layout is distinctly non-intuitive. Spend a little time in the library and you are bound to become lost. While lost, you will overhear something similar to the snippet of conversation I heard between a young couple:
He: “We’re on the fifth floor.”
She: “No, we are on the third floor.”
He: “No, the third floor is where we came in.”
She: “Well, where was the fourth floor then?”
He: “I don’t know, maybe the escalator leads to the fourth floor.”
The problem is so great that dozens of computer- printed signs that are taped on doors, walls, windows, rails, shelves, and stairs in an attempt to help lost patrons deface this shining new library. On my first visit to the library, I ended up on a level that had no elevator access and no clear exit. A harried Librarian directed me to an emergency stairwell explaining, “You are between floors. This floor dead ends. You either have to go back up half a level or use the emergency stairs if you want to continue down.”
On my second visit, that stairwell had been re-labeled with a little computer-printed sign taped to the wall saying STAIRS DOWN. The sign cannot disguise that this stairwell was never meant to be used by the public except in cases of emergency. The library has been forced to allow access because otherwise visitors to the library are left stranded. Dead ends, odd half levels, and misleading halls abound. A large building serving so many purposes is bound to have odd corners and confusing passages. However, to be so comprehensively non-intuitive in a building where people spend much of their time searching for things is unforgivable. Further, it runs directly counter to the Public component of a Public Library.
For all its failings in making material easily available, once one has tracked down reading material, the situation deteriorates. The library is almost completely lacking in intimate spaces. The main reading room, for instance, is on the 11th floor in an imposing atrium space that, during the day, is flooded with harsh light. The chairs and tables huddle uncomfortably close together. The tables are too small and somewhat rickety and a metal fence surrounds the seating area. In sum, the reading room, heart of any library, has the appeal of a Shopping Mall Food Court.
The rest of the library fares no better. Detracting from any sense of ambience is the use of plastics, cheap metals, concrete and strange synthetics. Unpleasant to touch, dull to the eye, and cold, almost every surface in the library seems unnecessarily clinical and off-putting. There are, for example, many new styles of chairs throughout the library. Having spent hours and hours in straight backed, hardwood library chairs I was more than ready to embrace new technology. Most of the chairs in the library, however, manage to be less comfortable than the classic dark wood library chair without capturing any of their simple beauty. Many of the railings are metal grates tipped on edge, hard plastic abounds, and there is a complete lack of natural fibers and colors. The choice of materials seems designed to shorten the amount of time one wants to spend in the library.
Many spaces in the library are also unpleasantly resonant. The extensive use of concrete, glass and cheap metal creates a remarkably live acoustic environment. Footsteps, key clicks, dropped books, and whispered conversations are annoyingly distinct. The pleasant, muffled quiet of many fine libraries is replaced by a sterile silence. Far from soothing, the reader feels exposed and oppressed simultaneously. Surreal as it may sound, there is also a central, metal staircase running through the stacks that rings like a detuned bell with a patrons every step.
The new Library also suffers from serious architectural problems. It is less an architectural marvel than a novelty. As the novelty wears thin, the public is bound to start noticing a few problems. For instance, the Fifth Street entrance brings one face to face with a thirty or forty-foot wide, five-story poured concrete wall. Cold, grey, formless, and out of scale, the imposing column seems reproachful of visitors. This concrete megalith is not modern, nor postmodern, nor industrial, nor anything other than oppressive and aptly representative of the complete lack of human sensitivity evident throughout the library.
Or consider the deep red paint on the curved walls of the public meeting area. Perhaps an interesting design element, but nearly impossible for the public to read the names of the rooms they are supposed to be entering. Finally, consider the views. There are none. It is no mean architectural feat to build a 12-story building wrapped entirely in glass having no views. However, the combination of the poor optical quality of the glass, the very thick and obtrusive girder system, and the many odd angles of the glass skin itself obstructs or eliminates what should be a collection of spectacular vistas. All that glass for naught. Overall, the building is designed to be viewed from the outside rather than from the inside out.
Seattle has built a public library in the Renaissance mode. Designed to be visually obtrusive and daring, it succeeds brilliantly as aggressive self-promotion. As a public library, however, it fails. The space is generally unpleasant, the books are hard to find, and one has no feel of the intimacy that is crucial to comfortable reading and studying. The reader has been sacrificed at the alter of Architectural Splendor.