“I’m Listening”: Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s Responses to the Changing Status of Libraries in the Computer Age
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It is not all to often that a
building will receive near-universal praise from the critics. More often than
not, there will be something irksome, something that does not feel as though it
belongs in the larger dialogue of contemporary architecture. Therefore, it is
remarkable when a prominent critic is almost brought to tears of joy in a
review. In his 2004 review of Rem Koolhaas and Office for Metropolitan
Architecture’s Seattle Public Library (fig.1,
2004), Herbert Muschamp did almost that when he proclaimed, “In more than
thirty years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new
building it has been my pleasure to review.”[1]
How then could a building designed as a celebration and repository of a
technology that is sadly sure to become outdated be not only the cutting-edge
of contemporary architecture, but also a key monument of post-World War II
design, even nearly ten years after it is completed? When looking through the
precedent within Koolhaas and OMA’s work, there is a red thread that runs
through all of their work: it is a desire to create a relevancy not solely for
the present, but more so for the future. In works like their 1989 proposal for
the National Library of France and their 1993 proposal for the University
Pierre and Marie-Curie, Jussieu campus library, there is a focus on the future.
Through thorough research of the past and present conditions of a project,
Koolhaas and his team are able to design for the future and create a building
like the Seattle Public Library be a perpetually relevant part of
architecture’s cannon.
For OMA, the program for the library
at the turn of the Millennium was beginning to enter an existential crisis.
E-Readers, like the iPad and the Kindle, and smartphones had yet to be
invented, but the computer was fast encroaching upon the domain of information
proliferation that printed matter had controlled since the Fifteenth Century
and the development of the printing press. In addition to this then-nascent
shift in media, there was also the reality that books were still being printed
in large numbers and that libraries would still be collecting them as fast as
they were being released. These specific concerns of the library as a
collecting institution had to be weighed against as what the project’s leading
architect, Joshua Prince-Ramus, remarked that the post-Carnegie library is a
also a social forum.[2]
What would result would be a tri-partite molding of past, present, and future.
When seen in the larger scope of
OMA’s library designs, the Seattle Public Library is just the latest stage in
their evolution of libraries. The first step came with their 1989 proposal for
the French National Library, or as OMA termed it, Trés Grande Bibliothèque (fig.
2). As this was a library primarily concerned wit the collection and
preservation of printed media – and not so much with its circulation – the
building would be focused with other tasks. However, even in the 1980s,
Koolhaas’s office was aware of the impending shift in communications, writing
that “At the moment when the electronics revolution seem about to melt all that
is solid – to eliminate all necessity for concentration and physical embodiment
[of printed media] – it seems absurd to imagine the ultimate library.”[3] But
it is out of this futility that opportunities arose. What OMA proposed, in
keeping with the project brief’s desire for a concentration of five collecting
institutions (such as film, music, journals, etc.) in a single center, was “[…]
a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory – books,
laser disks, microfiche, computers, data-bases. In this block, the major public
spaces are defined as absences of building,
voids carved out of the information solid.”[4]
However, this notion of individually floating programmatic elements would be
morphed into a more fluid identity a few years later in their proposal for
Jussieu.
In the library for the University of
Pierre and Marie-Curie, Jussieu (fig. 3),
OMA wanted to concentrate on the social aspects of the program. Writing in S,M,L,XL, Koolhaas puts forth that “The
construction of two bibliothèques at Jussieu University [Universite de Pierre
et Marie-Curie] should undo the social deficit that has accumulated since the
construction of the campus was aborted after the events of May ’68.”[5] In
their proposal, they do away with
“[…] a simple
stacking of floors, sections of each level are manipulated to touch those above
and below; all the planes are connected by a single trajectory, a warped
interior boulevard that exposes and relates all programmatic elements. The
visitor becomes a Baudelarian flâneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world
of books and information by the world scenario.”[6]
It is from
here, with the seemingly endless space of Jussieu and the realization a
library’s changing role that Seattle’s library is born. It is a literal
synthesis of its two elders that in themselves are monuments in architectural
history, even if they were never fully realized.
In their 2004 book, Content, OMA published the diagrams that
would eventually and literally become the design (fig. 4). In one of them, it juxtaposes the purely
classical-library-minded programs (of the Trés
Grand Bibliothèque lineage) in one, and in the other, the more social,
post-Carnegie uses of the library (akin to Jussieu). The images appear
striated, but when slotted together, they fit almost seamlessly. It is a
literal melding of its two parents. Through its synthesis, the Seattle Public
Library is able to serve the changing demands of the library. Not only can it
serve as a repository for an expanding collection of printed matter arrayed
along the helix-esque ramp organized hierarchically according to the Dewey
Decimal System, but it is also able to disperse this information more readily.
In the pre-Seattle Public Library epoch, librarians were scatted throughout the
stacks according to their field of specialty. In a time when the hybridization
of disciplines was minimal, this model made sense, but as the dividing lines
between disciplines began to recede, it would soon become obsolete. Koolhaas
wrote that in the pursuit of information in the contemporary age, “It is an
often demoralizing process – a trail of tears through dead-end sections, ghost
departments, and unexplained absences.”[7] In
response to the hybridization of disciplines, Koolhaas proposed placing all of
the librarians in one central location in a space that would be dubbed the
Mixing Chamber.[8]
Furthermore, the hybridization of disciplines is also engaged through the Book
Spiral (fig. 5). It is a
counter-argument against the precedent where sections and classifications were
further isolated by the separation made possible by the separate, disjointed
floors.[9]
Instead, with this helix set up, the ramp becomes an endless floor. In some
ways, it is the next step from the elevators that so enamored Koolhaas in his
essays on Manhattan. Just as like the Barrels of Love at Coney Island, that
“[…] creates synthetic intimacy between couples who would have never met
without its assistance[…],[10]
now the ramp provides a place where people and ideas can bump into one another,
mingle, and leave together. It is from this point that one can see the library
in Seattle as a heterotopia.
Michel Foucault’s concept of the
heterotopia is manifested in the Seattle Public Library. In his lecture, “On
Other Spaces,” he posits that “The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a
single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves
incompatible.”[11]
It is through this social condenser that people from different walks of life,
who would have otherwise not met outside of the library (the middle school
teacher and the corporate office secretary, the affluent trust fund college
student and the homeless man, etc., etc.) are able to interact directly, even
in light of the digital age, in the Mixing Chamber and the Book Spiral. And
through these interactions, new discourses and relationships can be formed. In
many ways, what the building is able to do is breathe a second life into the
aging technology of printed matter as allowing it to realize its original
potential as incubators for further discussion and inquiry. It allows the media
to become a vehicle for facilitating a social forum. If anything, the Seattle
Public Library, as a heterotopic space, with its ability to draw in divergent
people, ideas, and activities, is a catalyst for democracy in light of the
current epoch where information is conveyed (in regards to Marshall McLuhan’s
definition of hot and cool mediums[12])
by ways of hot, passive means. Information more often than not is now told
through shouting heads and pundits, and sadly is readily accepted by a large
populace. Koolhaas’s library on the other hand makes the cool, active medium of
books, “cool” again. It allows people to actively engage and seek out cool
mediums and even have them, both the users and the cool mediums, mingle with
the new hot mediums. The library of the future has to make the past relevant
and not an item for nostalgic fetishization.
The Seattle Public Library is a significant
monument in the cannon of architectural history. Through its synthesization of
its predecessors, Trés Grande
Bibliothèque and Jussieu, it is able to combine elements of the library as
an institution for collection as well as a center for magnifying social
discourse. So while other buildings contemporary to Seattle are concerned with
a formal element that marks its monumental significance, Seattle’s programmatic
content and organization makes it an instigator for a democratic society. It is
a building that makes change happen one page at a time.
Images
fig. 1
Rem Koolhaas and Office for
Metropolitan Architecture, Seattle Public Library, Seattle Washington, 2004
oma.com/projects/2004/seattle-central-library
fig. 2
Rem Koolhaas and Office for
Metropolitan Architecture, Trés Grande
Biliothèque, Paris, France, 1989
oma.com/projects/1989/très-grande-bibliothèque
fig. 3
Rem Koolhaas and the Office for
Metropolitan Architecture, Two Libraries – Jussieu, Paris, France, 1992
Image from John McMorrough’s lecture,
“Emerging Metropolitanisms,” 11/15/2012
fig. 4
Program Diagram from Rem Koolhaas’s Content, 141
fig. 5
Book Spiral Diagram from Rem
Koolhaas’s Content, 142
Bibliography
Foucault,
Michel. "On Other Spaces," Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/464648
Koolhaas, Rem. Content. Cologne: Taschen GmbH,
2004.
Koolhaas, Rem. “’Life in the
Metropolis’ or ‘The Culture of Congestion’.”
Architectural Design vol. 47, no. 5, (August 1977).
Koolhaas,
Rem and Bruce Mau. S,M,L,XL. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998.
McLuhan,
Marshall. “Media Hot and Cold,” in Understanding
Media: the Extensions of Man, 1964
McMorrough,
John, “Emerging Metropolitanisms.” Lecture delivered at Taubman
College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of
Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 15, 2012.
Muschamp,Herbert. "The Library That Puts on Fishnets
and Hits the Disco." The New
York Times, May 16, 2004. Reprinted
in Hearts of the City, The Selected Writings of Herbert Muschamp
Office for Metropolitan Architecture,
oma.eu
Prince-Ramus,
Joshua. TED Talks., Accessed December 11, 2012.
http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prince_ramus_on_seattle_s_library.html.
[1] Herbert Muschamp, "The Library That
Puts on Fishnets and Hits the Disco," The New York Times, May 16,
2004. Reprinted in Hearts of the City, The Selected Writings of Herbert
Muschamp. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 777.
[2] Joshua Prince-Ramus, TED Talks., Accessed December 11, 2012,
http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_prince_ramus_on_seattle_s_library.html.
[4]
Ibid, 610-16
[5]
Ibid, 1306-7
[6]
Ibid, 1318-25
[8]
Ibid
[9]
Ibid, 142
[10] Rem
Koolhaas, “’Life in the Metropolis’ or ‘The Culture of Congestion’”, Architectural Design vol. 47, no. 5,
(August 1977), 320.
[11] Michel Foucault, "On Other Spaces," Diacritics
16, no. 1 (1986): 25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/464648 .
[12]
Marshall McLuhan, “Media Hot and Cold,” in Understanding
Media: the Extensions of Man, 1964, 22-32
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