Architecture: One For The Books

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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."