Central Library
Seattle, Washington

Seattle's 11 floor Central Library holds an auditorium, reading room, mixing chamber, living room, staff floor, children's play area, meeting spaces, and innovative “Books Spiral.” The crystalline steel-and-glass structure includes numerous sustainable design elements.

Excerpted From OMA's Website
The ambition is to redefine and reinvent the Library as an institution no longer exclusively dedicated to the book, but as an information store, where all media—new and old—are presented under a regime of new equalities. In an age where information can be accessed anywhere, it is the simultaneity of all media and the professionalism of their presentation and interaction, that will make the Library new.

The library is transformed from a space to read into a social center with multiple responsibilities.

The building is divided into spatial compartments dedicated to and equipped for specific duties. Flexibility can exist within each section, but not at the expense of any of the other compartments... Change is possible by deliberately redefining use, and rededicating compartments to new programs.

The program was `combined` and consolidated to identify five platforms within the apparently ungovernable proliferation of functions and media—each platform a programmatic cluster that is architecturally defined and equipped for optimal performance, with different sizes, densities, opacities.

The in-between spaces are trading floors where librarians inform and stimulate, where the interface between different platforms is organized - spaces for work, interaction, and play.

By genetically modifying the superposition of floors in the typical American high-rise, a building emerges that is at the same time sensitive (the slopes will admit unusual quantities of daylight where desirable), contextual (each side can react differently to specific urban conditions) and iconic. Its angular facets form a plausible bracketing of Seattle`s new modernity.

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