Seattle Public Library

Seattle Public Library - Rem Koolhaas, architect

Media today is more mediatory than ever, insinuating itself between us and everything else. In particular, digitization has created a situation where media is now not only a means by which we understand the world (as with traditional media like newspapers), but increasingly the means by which we experience it. Even when we visit real urban spaces such as Times Square, the plurality of experience suggested by the two words “public city,” has been slurred into one word — “publicity.” Through this slurring, the larger experiential potentials of architecture, as well as media, more often than not become diminished.

Yet, in several completed projects in the United States, it is possible to see a renewed desire to reclaim architecture’s potential as the actual media interface itself. Michael Maltzan’s MOMA Queens, Zaha Hadid’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Herzog and DeMeuron’s de Young Museum in San Francisco, and Rem Koolhaas’s Central Library in Seattle each try to provide visually engaging urban experiences in real time and space without demoting architecture to mere backdrop for other more immersive digital media. In much of the rhetoric used to explain these works, their architects also reveal a common intention to confront the dilemmas of producing architecture in an age of digital media by using spatially and temporally exciting visual strategies rather than simply decorating a building’s surface.