BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
AFTER AN HOUR of watching architect Rem Koolhaas’s slide presentation at Benaroya Hall on 5/3, I finally figured out the dual schemes behind Koolhaas’s design for the new Seattle library:
(1) It’s a giant, 15-story, uneven, vertical pile of books. (Imagine the stack of law books in the Perry Mason closing credits)
(2) It’s also the linear, angular, rational counterpart to the Experience Music Project’s touchy-feely curves and textures.
Seattle’s a town where yang-oriented geeks and eggheads have long been prized (Boeing engineers, software coders, biotech researchers). But it’s also a town where more yin-ish salespeople and dealmakers have brought the real money in.
The new library and EMP, while situated some two miles apart from one another, will provide a balanced tribute to both sides of the city’s character.
I could bore you with rundowns of how Koolhaas (yes, it’s pronounced “cool-house”) discussed the building’s schemes for foot-traffic flow, seizmic safety, natural-light bringing-in, computer access, balance between public-gathering and info-storage functions, and ability to handle expanded multimedia collections. But if you’re anything like most of the packed Benaroya audience, you want to know about two particular aspects of the design:
(1) The translucent floors on certain levels won’t be so see-thru that enterprising Net-entrepreneurs could use them in making “upskirt” image sites.
(2) And the spiraling central corridor of book stacks (officially devised not as a tribute to the labyrintian monastic library in The Name of the Rose but to allow “the uninterrupted flow” of the Dewey Decimal system) won’t be too steep for either wheelchairs or employees’ carts, Koolhaas insists. It’ll just be a gentle four-percent grade, much easier to handle than the steep 20-percent-grade Benaroya Hall aisles (or the spiraling galleries at NYC’s Guggenheim Muesum).
Koolhaas tried to prove his point with still photos of a full-size mockup of the sloping stacks, built on short notice by the Seattle Opera scene shop. The photos showed humans and wheeled devices ascending and descending and stopping on the ramped floor with ease.
You might be able to make your own test; the mockup might be installed for a couple days or so at the current downtown library later this month. If that happens, you might even be able to give it the real test–how well it allows for the descent of marbles, Hot Wheels cars, and Slinkys.
CORRECTION OF THE WEEK (Tom Heald at TV Barn: “A few weeks ago this column may have implied that pop stars Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears may not be ‘naturally curvy.’ What I meant to say is that they are untalented. I regret possibly offending their fans.”
TOMORROW: You don’t have to be a Republican to be tired of demographic-butt-kissing paeans to the Sixties Generation.
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