OMA's design for the Seattle Public Library--one of the firm's most heavily anticipated projects to date--begins with a radical rethinking of the very nature of the library. If the library exists today as a threatened sanctuary, it has been done in by its own stubborn reliance on one kind of literacy and its consequent blindness to other emerging forms that increasingly dominate our culture, especially the huge efficiencies and pleasures of visual intelligence. Rather than merely package this traditional institution in a new way, OMA has completely reinvented it, transforming it wholeheartedly into a site able to aggressively orchestrate the coexistence of all available technologies for collecting, condensing, distributing, reading, and manipulating information. The library will no longer be loyal to the book... In more architectural terms, the $156 million building has an angular, meshlike glass and metal skin that surrounds a series of floating public spaces: a kid's area at the bottom; a living room for browsing, public meeting areas, and a coffee shop; a mixing chamber where patrons can work intensively with librarians; and a reading room at the top with views of Mount Rainier and Puget Sound. In between these platforms are a series of programmatic boxes containing the more stable, or fixed, parts of the library program, including a continuous four-story book spiral where the entirety of the library's books will be stored. This third book in Actar's series of Verb monographs reveals how the Seattle Public Library works, and examines it in terms of new media technologies that have changed the status of the library in the contemporary city from a traditional repository for books to an iinformation store.i Also included is a comprehensive account of the design process, from initial concept through construction to ribbon cutting.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic,
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This review is from: Office for Metropolitan Architecture: Seattle Public Library (Paperback)
Fantastic book on one of the worlds leading comtemporary buildings. All Architectural offices should follow the lead of OMA in publishing literature on all significant contemporary architecture so the public can get an understanding about why their public buildings are the way they are.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some Pages Require A Magnifying Glass,
By Tami Jackson "of SunTiger MOJO" (Greater Seattle Area) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Office for Metropolitan Architecture: Seattle Public Library (Paperback)
With most pages featuring brilliant and vivid photographs printed on high quality paper, this informative work also presents timelines for the library's construction and the ideas that inspired it. Content includes criticisms and emotions that ran strong behind planning and review of the proposed city project. The reason I give it only four stars is because on pages 66 and 67, where all floors are mapped out and described in helpful detail, the font was so small (think Time New Roman size 3) this reader had to employ a powerful magnifying glass in addition to the usual reading glasses in order to decipher it. The publisher or layout team had shrunk too much diagram information down to too few pages, to an illegible degree. Thankfully that only happens on just a few pages. Most of the book is of the highest physical and readable quality.
5.0 out of 5 stars
nice item,
This review is from: Office for Metropolitan Architecture: Seattle Public Library (Paperback)
that's really a good book, and much cheaper than it in the library. I like it!
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