June 01, 2004
The libraries resemble one another in that they both aim to attract a wide public and to provide quality surroundings for their users. In Seattle, for example, the library is meant to boost the liveliness of the business district, while the Utrecht building hopes to draw additional crowds onto the university campus. However, the respective architects have tackled similar tasks with wholly dissimilar architectural strategies. OMA built a transparent diamond in Seattle, with the public interior spaces forming an animated outer shell. Wiel Arets, on the other hand, has created a black box that sucks up its users like a sponge and retains the outward comportment of an inviolable monolith.
It is interesting that both these buildings possess similar qualities despite the radically different messages they express. Behind the Seattle spectacle of a humanity-filled shell, there lurks an efficient architectural machine based on a perfectly engineered arrangement of books. In Utrecht, the recalcitrant black volume proves to contain an extensive system of reading rooms, with spaces of differing scales which offer a rich diversity of characters, despite the omnipresence of concrete and glass and despite a colour range limited to black and white only. While the points of departure for OMA’s architecture were the dynamic social processes taking place in and around the library, Arets began with a static, practically archaic concept of architecture and aesthetics. The outcome in both cases is nonetheless a temple to the encounter between people and books.
Wiel Arets Architect and Associates is based in Maastricht.