Seattlest Pix 09Nov24
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Thanksgiving Pairing Suggestion: Dessert Isn't Just a Meal
Dance Dance Party Party Back in Session
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.
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Just to dig my "sole Seattlest SPL detractor" knife in a little further, and twist it, this is what people mean by designing a library that attracts and interacts with the public on the street:
http://www.slcpl.lib.ut.us/locations.jsp?parent_id=8&page_id=20
And that photo doesn't even do it justice. Along with the fountains, outdoor sculpture and small-concert spaces, there's a huge architectural spiral ramp that you can access from the outside, which leads you up on top of the library roof, where there's gardens, nooks, tables with chairs, and views into the library.
This photo shows an inside view out to the spiral: http://photos.windley.com/gallery/view_photo.php?set_albumName=slc_library&id=DSC00018
This whole slideshow captures it beautifully:
http://photos.windley.com/gallery/slideshow.php?set_albumName=slc_library
My heart just breaks every time I hear praise for our fabled famous-designer SPL, and I think of how gorgeous and appealing this little small-town alternative is. That's right. I'm a hater.
I've heard plenty of people -- librarians and patrons alike -- complain about the usability and navigability of the downtown library. And while I love the look of the thing, they've got a point. Basically, it takes too long to move between parts of the building, both because areas aren't clearly labeled and because traffic paths are hard to find and (in the case of the elevators) slow-moving.
That said, I much prefer it to the old building and think it looks gorgeous. My real gripe with the SPL system involves infrastructure and customer service problems that I've noticed over the last year or so -- but maybe I'll just do a post about that sometime.
(Someone should update the library's Wikipedia article with some of the negative criticism. It's all glowing for now.)
Hate the new facility? Never! I fell in love with the SPL back when it was a ratty, smelly old box. In comparison to that beast, whatever criticisms are brought against seem trivial. However, the SLC library looks lovely and impressive (nice link, Courtney), and I appreciate James' comments.And I'm glad that they chose to do something more than renovate some office space (or the part of the convention center they were in during the construction of the new facility). Perhaps they could have done something differant (I'm not an architect); I'll leave that to someone else. For me, at least, the SPL's main allure is not the architecture but the collection.
I am unimpressed by the new library design, and feel especially annoyed by its utter inattention to patron convenience. For identifying it as a public library and distinguishing the public entrances from the service doors. The sloped iron gridwork covering up entrance views provides no wind or rain protection gridwork leaning against the exteriors provides no wind or rain protection and will be a cleaning maintenance nightmare, not to mention an unattractive nuisance for wannabe rock climbers and suicide jumpers.
I visited the building last week and saw one confused patron chased off a service elevator because the library doesn't bother to clearly mark public accessways, and instead has a guard riding up and down the service elevator warning patrons to stay off it.
The place is a disaster. Apart from the exterior design, whatever one thinks of it, the new SPL is the least inviting public building I have ever encountered.
I'm somewhat of an admirer of Koolhaas, but his SPL doesn't do it for me. I've walked the entire place, top to bottom, on multiple occasions, and what I found was simple: time and again, I and other people ended up stepping over railings or through narrow, awkward gaps in the architecture to get where we needed to go. That's flat-out inexcusable -- making it difficult to get from point A to adjacent point B, ten feet away, just for the sake of a recessed ramp or a diagonal strut, isn't just indulgent. It's bad, amateurish architecture.
Then there's the signage. Those etched-metal diagrams proved so immediately useless that librarians began taping up day-glo printouts explaining what and where everything was. Huh? Did the budget not include signage or was the aesthetic too minimalist for that? Pfah.
The new SPL building is garbage. It's a great library and the services are terrific, but the building is an embarrassment. And yes, at street level all of Koolhaas's work is meaningless.