Hate SPL
We aggressively agree when they come after the EMP, sometimes to the point of inspiring an uncomfortable silence in the wake of our diatribe. Rarely do we have to defend the Needle, which is not to say that we actually want to go there. Can't we locals and tourists alike admire it from afar? And generally we beam in the steady glow of praise piled onto the Central Library, as if we drew it up ourselves one night over drinks with Rem.
For awhile we read all the reviews in that same manner. "Yes, yes, thank you. Yes, it's quite successfull." Eventually we stopped reading them, or at least stopped buying magazines just to read them, content in the knowledge that a rolling boil of good will towards the building (and ourselves) was somewhere out there. Finding it listed on a "World's Most Overrated Places" list yesterday was definitely a sucker punch:
The "Bilbao Effect", in which a city garners international attention for a showy architectural project, has become pervasive, with many mid-size cities splurging on high-profile architects in the hopes of attracting more tourists. For the millions they spend, cities get a stunning artistic objects but little in the way of long-term improvement to their public realm. In the U.S., the two prime examples of the Bilbao Effect—the Quadracci Pavilion of the Milwaukee Art Museum and the new Seattle Public Library—definitely qualify as Overrated Places. The plazas of the Quadracci Pavilion are incredibly sterile, surrounded by roads wide enough to be highways. And the Seattle Library, as we wrote in this newsletter last year, fails to engage people at sidewalk level, presenting incredibly dull facades to the downtown streets that surround it.
We were fishing around on the floor for our teeth while the Project for Public Spaces continued to kick. It goes on, in the form of a link to a newsletter piece the PPS did in 2004:
That is where Koolhaas's library, sealed away from the sidewalks and streets around it, fails completely. In fact, patrons are already bemoaning its lack of accessibility. This is not only a missed opportunity to bring new life to the area around the library, it also means that use of the library itself will ebb in the long run. When the hype has died down, what will remain is another self-contained architectural object that adds little to public life around it.
How to incorporate this into our worldview... Hate like the EMP: "Yeah, this overpriced, overdesigned block turns a cold shoulder to the sidewalk." Love from afar like the Space Needle: "There's no reason to go there, but the flickr sets are nice." Or bury our heads in the glass raw material? Haters will hate. The PPS is just wrong.
