Rem Koolhaas Approves of Documentary on Koolhaas

The Seattle Central Library is enormously popular with architectural critics, photographers, and tourists, but it also tends to be noisy, in the usual sense and architecturally, and so is at odds with the bookworm personality. The first clue that books are not a primary draw is how far you have to travel inside the building before you can get to any--and that the library had to create maps for people who wanted to find them.

Happily, the plans did include making public room for most of the library's holdings, but we get a strange feeling they are on display, as if in a museum. "Look at these books!" the library seems to say. "We are not sure what they were used for, but we have many fine examples." Maybe this was a statement by Koolhaas, or simply a strategic response to a public library concerned about spending over $160 million on a new building when library use was declining--make it into a civic center, instead.

The walkable book spiral sounds great until you actually need to pull several books in a research project and have to traverse the whole disorienting length. On the one hand, the books are on physical floors, but on the other, you have a hard time discerning one floor from another. Low-level frustrations and irritations are not the end of the world, but it's remarkable that the library is so welcoming to everyone but its core constituency, and displays so inept an understanding of how people use space to map their location.

There's something perverse, too, about creating a "10th-floor reading room with walnut floors and 'robust' carpets, with seating for 400 library users and 360-degree views of the city and Elliott Bay," [Seattle Times] for people who have come downtown to stick their noses in books in solitary splendor. Granted, there are not that many sunny summer days in Seattle, but up there under the glass on those days you squint and soak in sweat.

Privileging the views outward as much as the views inward is a Koolhaasian theme--along with floors that connect Mobius-strip-like--and while both add tremendously to entertainment value, they do nothing to help you focus your attention on navigation, research, and reading.

After his experiences in the U.S., the film points out, Rem Koolhaas was so disgusted with "process" that he leapt at the chance to build in China, applauding their willingness to get things done without pesky rules and regulations and oversight. There he has been building a structure that "wants to collapse"--the CCTV HQ. The film sums it up as a Dutch skyscraper, which encapsulates the contradictions we see in Koolhaas, philosophizing one moment with Bruno Latour, and riffing on Bigness with his Chinese Twin Towers the next.