Seattle Reboots Its Future

About 1,000 people attended two events in December 1999 where Koolhaas laid out his initial concepts. After that, 10 groups of library users representing various segments of the population developed lists of recommendations for Koolhaas and OMA. Jacobs also assembled 37 different groups of library staffers to create similar lists based on their experiences working in the existing central library.

Jacobs, 49, seems a quietly effective coalition builder. She relies on persistence, rather than on strong-arming. Mayor Schell talks excitedly about Seattle, one of the centers of the Information Age, finally getting the central library that it deserves. Dick Brass, the point man for Microsoft's e-books initiative, is a loyal supporter of Jacobs, and he personally donated money in support of a bond measure that paved the way for the construction of a new library. A goal to raise $60 million in private funds for the Libraries for All program, which includes the construction of the central library, as well as the construction or renovation of 22 neighborhood libraries, was easily met -- and then raised to $75 million. Paul Allen, whose father worked as a librarian at the University of Washington, gave $22.5 million. Bill Gates, who as a child was a competitor in summer reading competitions at the library's North East branch, gave $20 million.

"There are times when the planets align," Jacobs says of Seattle's current prosperity. "And during those times, it's good when you're able to move projects forward quickly."

Jacobs thought that it would be helpful to look at other West Coast libraries for inspiration, so she scheduled a tour for architects from OMA and some of her staff. But Jacobs and her team felt that "none of the libraries worked in the way that we wanted ours to work." So they organized blank-sheet-of-paper brainstorms. One idea that they came up with is something that Koolhaas calls "the mixing chamber," which will be situated at the entrance to the library's nonfiction area.

"The mixing chamber," Jacobs explains, "is all about interdisciplinary study and learning. Say you want to learn about Aaron Copland. That's not just music. There's a million topics that you could study: music, dance, Brooklyn, homosexuality, Judaism. If you come to the library, you may not know what direction you want to take. So the mixing chamber is the first place you arrive. Our incredibly talented and skilled librarians will be there, and they'll help you look for things in an interdisciplinary way."

The mixing chamber will lead to a four-story, Guggenheim-esque spiral that will contain all of the library's nonfiction materials in what Jacobs refers to as "an uninterrupted Dewey run" -- Dewey referring to the grand old Dewey decimal system, of course.

"The spiral," she continues, "is the big idea for this building. There will be a sense of being in this brain-candy store, where everything's available to you." The spiral will also give library users access to more books in fewer steps, according to calculations done by the architects. They found that if you travel 500 feet on flat floors, you can have access to 1,400 bookcases, but if you travel 500 feet on the spiral, you have access to 2,500 bookcases.

Jacobs says that while the new library will be "wired to the max," the building will "honor the book." "I'm willing to bet on the existence of the book, at least through my children's lifetime," she says. "The book will be around. Even Bill Gates has a library in his house."

Feeding a Cultural Ecosystem

Alex Steffen ducks through an Alice in Wonderland-sized doorway slightly below street level, skirts the workout floor of a boxing gym, and enters into a small art gallery called Soil. The small, subterranean room houses a show called "Abstraction Construction," edgy abstract works by young artists.

A few blocks away, Steffen, who runs Seattle's Fuse Foundation, drops in on Susan Robb and Jeff Miller, who have just brought their "Golden Tower Project" back from the Burning Man festival. It's a cylinder composed of specimen jars filled with, yes, urine solicited from other artists. While you might think that such a sculpture was designed solely to be confrontational, the "Golden Tower Project" can also be looked at as an object of beauty. Before you know what it is, it resembles a multihued stained-glass window.

Like the artwork or hate it, these are, as Steffen puts it, "the R&D labs of the art world." And these are the artists that the Fuse Foundation focuses on. "We're trying to get people who have an extraordinary amount of potential but who are just starting out," says Steffen, 33. "A Fuse fellowship lets them quit their day job. We give them health care, Net access, office support, and networking opportunities. And we teach them survival skills."