2000 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Rem Koolhaas has given the $156 million Seattle Public Library an angular glass facade encased by mesh-like metal ‘skin’ that surrounds five levels, easily stands as its most visible architectural element. Commissioned by the city in 1999 to undertake the design, Koolhaas originally had included a copper screen on the glass exterior that was eliminated due to concerns by the Seattle Design Commission that it would make the building too transparent.

Koolhaas describes Seattle Public Library as “the building to signal that something special is going on here”. The design runs counter to the traditional notion of a library as a place devoted solely to books. Although the design includes book stacks, emphasis is placed on spacious community spaces and areas for media such as technology, photography and video.

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Rem Koolhaas was born in Rotterdam in 1944, at the culminating year of World War II devastation. He was the eldest of three children, and his sensibility was first created by ruined landscape. “Ruins everywhere and really poor,” he says. His father, Anton Koolhaas, was a renowned Dutch novelist and journalist. His father, in his writing, had strongly supported the Indonesian cause for autonomy from the colonial Dutch, and when the war of independence was won he had been invited over to run a cultural programme for three years.

Rem experienced live in Indonesia when he moved to Jakarta at 8^th. “It was a very important age for me, and I really lived as an Asian.” Koolhaas recalls. He compares the two destroyed cities, and fell in love with its atmosphere of desperate. “Rotterdam was totally poor and destroyed, and Indonesia something like the same.” And when he came back in 1956 to Rotterdam he realized that everything had been fixed up straightly, made him boring. Later we can see that Koolhaas’s masterpiece as a manifesto to recreate his lost childhood excitement.

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