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As you walk down Seattle's Fourth Avenue, the new Central Library jumps out at youliterally; its third-story jaw juts out over a ground-level plaza. Encamped amid nondescript beige and black boxy buildings, this gangly greenhouse, designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and opened last May, grabs the gaze of passersby from all of its many angles. On the outside, its polygonal form, cloaked in aqua glass, is arresting. Inside, the sights are just as striking: neon yellow escalators, video art installations behind glass, potted plants dotting spacious reading areas with foam chairs. When Seattle does see the sunshine, as it did on the summer day I visited, the building yanks in the surrounding rays and chases away all the dreariness usually associated with both the city of Seattle and the institution of the public library.
According to reviewsincluding Paul Goldberger's in The New Yorker, which called the building "the most important new library to be built in a generation, and the most exhilarating"Koolhaas designed the Central Library to be both more inviting and more logical than the usual library building.1 His unorthodox design achieves both goals. The soaring, see-through walls make the building enticing, in contrast with the stuffy, sarcophagal structures of the mid-20th century. Meanwhile, the floors that hold the library's collection are set on alternating inclines, each floor rising to meet the next, zig-zagging their way to the top and allowing the collection to continue unbroken from beginning to end. You can thus walk the length of the entire Dewey Decimal System without setting foot on a stair. (For the sake of your calves, start in the 900s with history and travel and work your way down to computers and reference in the 000s.) "It's a hard building to map," apologizes an attendant at the information desk.
The cynical take on Koolhaas' architectural feat is that it is a desperate attempt to sell the idea of books and reading to a hopelessly distracted culture. The optimistic view is that the Seattle Central Library is a triumphal statement about the relevance of books in a digital age, not a tombstone but a keystone of a new information era. The library did, after all, open ten years after the publication of Sven Birkerts' The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, when the future of text printed on paper was considered to be in doubt. The day was surely soon to come when anyone at a computer could pull up any text they wished, and a building filled with shelves of books would stand unoccupied and obsolete. Libraries found themselves, Geoffrey Nunberg wrote, approaching the end of "a century in which the institution has more or less languished in the public consciousness, and at a moment when many people think the library has no future at all in the age of the Internet."2
Instead, libraries are "busier than ever," Wheaton [Ill.] Public Library director Sarah Meisels told me last year, as she stood surveying the scene in her bustling building.3 Visits to public libraries doubled in the 1990s, according to the American Library Association, up to over 1.1 billion in 2001, while the number of items checked out rose from about 1.4 billion to about 1.8 billion. And despite the dominance of diet fads and other fatuities on the bestseller listsand despite a much-ballyhooed National Endowment for the Arts study this summer called "Reading At Risk," which found that Americans are reading less fiction than they were 20 years agothe fact remains: we are a culture that still loves our books.
Still, libraries have stayed alive in part by reinventing themselves as multipurpose, multimedia information centers, whose art galleries, audio and video materials, auditoriums, coffee shops, gift shops, and, of course, Internet terminals are becoming as essential to their purpose as books are. Who would have thought that it would be the audio book that would come of age in the 1990s, while the much-hyped e-book went down in flames? The Wheaton Public Library expanded its book holdings from 40,000 to 55,000 books from 1978 to 2002; during the same period, it increased its audio-visual holdings from 5,000 to 45,000.
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