(via Eric Scharf):

“Seattle Library architect Rem Koolhaas is from the Netherlands. So is
this little film.Coincidence? I think no.”

(Here, by the way, is Scharf’s own library foto-essay, complete with cute child pix.)

…begins with some figurative art seen around town recently.

Here’s our last batch of shots from the spankin’-new downtown library.

Have I any qualms about the PoMo (or is it NeoMo?) palace of info? A few.

The phunky phoam phurniture’s slick and tres comfy, but I dunno how the chairs and couches will survive under constant use-n’-abuse.

The kids’ area is boistrously joyful, but at least a little sound muffling might be nice. (The Mixing Station area can also be a little quietude-challenged.)

But aside from these minor qualms, I’d say the place is a solid hit. It’s got thousands of books, lots of other printed and audio-visual documents, dozens of makeout spots, clean restrooms, mod colors, free wi-fi, and more fun-type atmosphere than most retail stores.

AS THREATENED YESTERDAY, yet more shots of the new downtown Seattle Public Library, designed by Dutch celebrity-architect Rem Koolhaas.

On one of the chartreuse escalators, a cute yet stunning public art piece awaits in hiding. In this image, you can just barely see a porthole, though which other patrons can peer out, and thus become a temporary part of the art itself.

I’ve heard only a few criticisms of the place thus far. One patron told me the place was louder than a library oughta be. Another, believing a Seattle public building should express a “Northwest” character, criticized a lack of wood on the walls.

And one woman said the Dutch architect didn’t understand American fears; otherwise, he wouldn’t have designed so many nooks and alcoves in which homeless child-abductors might hide.

I believe this fear to be grossly exaggerated. I’m also SO tired of the anti-homeless “jokes” I’ve heard, even from self-styled “radicals,” during the weeks before the new library’s opening.

Yes, we need a dedicated downtown drop-in and hygiene center; despite the consternations of merchants. We need to take care of our less-privileged citizens, not demonize them.

A library’s not the place for those functions. But it is a place for other aspects of rebuilding one’s life, including self-education and job research. The vastness of the new library’s public spaces makes this possible, with relative comfort for all of us.

WE’LL RUN LOTSA LIBRARY PIX over the course of the week. Be prepared.

It was a glorious day inside and out. Everyone seemed truly joyous; as if this magnificent cathedral of popular learning would herald a brighter future for our troubled region.

Seattle’s been called both a “city of readers” and a “city of engineers.” The new Seattle Public Library’s primarily a feat of stunning engineering, and secondly a tribute to reading and to the imagination.

More importantly, out of all the fancy-schmancy new PoMo monuments in this town, it’s the one that’s open to the public every week of the year with no cover charge.

(Now, if the city’d only commit enough funds to properly run the place…)

Head Librarian Deborah Jacobs (like me, a onetime Corvallis-ite), the mayor, and most of the City Council were on hand at the opening, along with several drum ensembles.

Welcoming patrons from inside the Fifth Avenue entrance: Everyone’s favorite Action Librarian, Nancy Pearl.

The sign adjacent to Pearl reveals:

(1) The Koolhaas team’s penchant for bold colors, especially chartreuse (named for a liqueur invented by “Chartist” monks, and hence perfectly appropriate for a contemplative place), and

(2) The team’s choice of Futura Extra Bold as the library’s official typeface. You can tell near the top left corner of this page that I’m also a Futura fan. More significantly, it was the official typeface of the Sub Pop Singles Club, which probably led the Dutch designers to think of it as a “Seattle” font.

I was elated to see the “writers’ room” near the top of the building’s co-named for our ol’ pal Carlo Scandiuzzi, who booked rock shows at the Showbox before becoming a movie actor-producer, and member of assorted local arts/humanities boards.

The children’s area is vast, raucously noisy, and right on the ground floor. It’s got lotsa large, angular concrete posts, which may remind some oldsters of past fun times at the Kingdome or the Coliseum. It’s got games, toys, fun props, kid-sized computer desks and chairs, and a semi-hidden “story hour room.”

One person I met compared the vast interior to a set from a Jacques Tati film. I was thinking more sci-fi. Indeed, it’ll be hard for Paul Allen’s new Science Fiction Museum to look more science-fictiony than parts of the library.

…the 250-plus pix I took at the new library opening today. I’ll have some of ’em up later Monday. ‘Til then, ponder this list of the top 10 movies set in llibraries. Why this person chose UHF and not The Name of the Rose, I’ll never know.

A fellow Stranger refugee stopped me on the street the other evening. He said he still enjoyed my writing, my vocabulary, and my sense of style.

But he also said he thought I’d limited my vision by holding to a rose-colored nostalgia for “the old Seattle,” a viewpoint that’s ill-suited toward effectively discussing today’s city of high tech and hipsters.

I beg, as I do so darned often, to differ.

You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

The mindset that created the Century 21 Exposition, f’rinstance, is with us still. The magnificent Space Needle was built with private money on land essentially donated by the city. The publicly-funded exhibit buildings were either cheap “multipurpose” constructions (just like most local government buildings between then and the late ’90s) or repurposed older structures that weren’t that distinguished to begin with.

The old Seattle had its progressive, even radical ideas, alongside plain old fashioned racism/sexism. Some of its citizens held both types of beliefs at once. (I’m thinking of labor organizers who appealed to anti-Chinese hysteria among their flocks, and of “New Left” rabblerousers who defined “women’s liberation” as the right to give blow jobs.)

Today, Seattle loves diversity. Or rather, it loves the idea that it loves diversity; just so long as its white female children don’t have to go to the same schools as black male children.

The old Seattle had civic leaders who tirelessly struggled to have their burg seen as “world class,” but always by someone else’s standards. (Hence the ’60s campaigns to bulldoze the Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and large swaths of the Arboretum for parking lots, office towers, and highway lanes respectively.)

In more recent years, Seattle had civic leaders who saw every problem as solvable by a construction project. That’s why we can build new libraries and arts facilities, but can’t afford to run them.

The old Seattle’s governmental gears could grind very slowly; just as they can now. It took the “foodie” restaurant revolution of the ’70s before the city legalized sidewalk cafes. Now, we need, but are less likely to get, a similar outspoken demand before the city will allow new strip clubs.

If I may switch metaphors for a moment: Leonard Maltin’s book Of Mice and Magic, an invaluable history of the early animation business, refers at one point to the Warner Bros. cartoon studio’s desire in the thirties to “keep up with Disney, and plagiarize him at the same time.” Seattle’s assorted drives over the years to become “world class,” by imitating all the things all the other would-be “world class” burgs do, have often been just as self-defeating.

Warners conquered the cartoon world when its directors and artists stopped aping Disney and started to create their own brand of humor. LIkewise, Seattle will come into its own as it develops its own ways of doing city things.

We don’t have to have a cars-only transportation plan, or sprawling McMansions devouring the countryside. We don’t have to give in to corporate job-blackmail shakedowns. We can lead, not follow.

That’s not the “old Seattle,” but it’d be a better Seattle.

I speak, of course, of the developer of California’s Madonna Inn, the fantastic and beloved pop-fantasy motel depicted in the film Aria and the Umberto Eco book Travels in Hyperreality.

ANOTHER RANDOM SET for Photo Phriday. Enjoy.

JUST ANOTHER BUNCH of random Photo Phriday stuph.

DARN IT, it’s a half decade into the twenty-first century and I still don’t have my Futuro house yet.

…from the now-evicted Publix Hotel in the International District (above) and the King County Courthouse (below).

Above and below, the former Les Piafs boutique on Second. (It moved to become the only locally-owned retailer in the city-subsidized downtown mall Pacific Place.)

Above and below, the former Land Rover showroom on Westlake. (It moved into the historic Lincoln-Mercury building up the street.)

Cardhaus, the role-playing-game parlor on Roosevelt that opened after Wizards of the Coast’s more elaborate game room closed, is just plain gone.

…aka “Galloping Gertie,” places #4 on an ESPN.com list of “Worst Group Efforts.”

…I’d even do what this guy’s doing.

ONE OF THE TEMPORARILY-REVEALED old advertising signs on the north face of the Commodore Hotel on Second Avenue, during the construction of the condo tower where Bethel Temple had been.

SOMETIME NEXT MONTH, Belltown’s first worthy cyber-cafe successor to the burnt-down Speakeasy Cafe will come in the form of the new Zeitgeist/Top Pot branch on Fifth Avenue. Coffee, donuts, free Wi-Fi, art, and a large meeting space.