One For The Books

LARA SWIMMER/ESTO
SEATTLE: The glass walls of the library are covered in a steel lattice

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The platforms could have just as well been called flying carpets. All through this library there's a sense of being suspended in midair, with buildings and sky summoning you from just beyond the angled glass. There are spaces you might even call lyrical except that lyricism is not a word in the Koolhaas vocabulary. His buildings can be fascinating, vexing, exciting, even annoying, but don't count on them to produce the indisputable new kind of beauty that you routinely get from Frank Gehry. Beauty is an occasional by-product of the Koolhaas approach but never an aim.

You understand that right away at his new student center at the Illinois Institute, a campus designed and once headed by none other than Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Thanks to the sleeve for the railway that sits atop the center's V-shaped roof, it has an aggressively awkward exterior, like a shed being crushed by a giant auto muffler. Inside it's a kind of bright angular cyclotron designed for the purpose of accelerating human fusion. By encouraging students to literally cross paths at every turn, it offers itself as a substitute for the city that once bordered closely on the campus before urban renewal swept it away. "By the time we arrived," Koolhaas says, "the city had disappeared. The building is an attempt to reintroduce density."

A signal event for Koolhaas came in 1999 when a project to design a new Los Angeles headquarters for Universal Studios collapsed after the company decided, in the frenzy of media mergers, it needed its money elsewhere. From that experience he concluded that architecture was too slow for a marketplace in which the global conglomerates that have the heft for the big commissions emerge and disintegrate in less time than it takes to turn blueprints into buildings usually about five years. But there was worse to come. Over the next few years, proposals to expand the Whitney Museum in New York City and reconfigure the Los Angeles County Museum of Art also fell victim to belt tightening. A proposed Manhattan hotel was canceled too.

Licking his wounds all the while, Koolhaas turned increasingly toward Asia, especially China, where explosive growth has created a boom for Western and Japanese architects and where the Beijing authorities have the power to see major projects through to completion. His most important recent commission is a massive new headquarters in Beijing for China Central Television (CCTV). It's the most radically configured large building in years, a torqued trapezoid that looks a bit like a skyscraper attempting a somersault. "The building has been organized as a loop that allows it to connect every component of television making," he says. "That form makes for more of a community."

The CCTV building is a sensitive commission; it's the headquarters for the government-controlled media operation of a one-party state, an odd project for a man committed to ideas like spontaneous connection and untrammeled movement. Koolhaas has been criticized for cozying up to one of the most noxious departments of the Beijing power apparatus. In his defense, he insists that China is evolving into a freer society. "The Chinese are putting in place the legal and political infrastructure that will enable them to manage their transitions," he says. "We did not go ahead before we established in our own minds that the conditions for CCTV to evolve into something like the BBC were in place." Something like the BBC? Let's see its first documentary on the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Koolhaas loves contradiction. With this project, he may find himself moving ever deeper into one. If he needs a refresher on what an open flow of information really looks like, he should revisit Seattle. What he has made there is a masterly example of what freedom of movement is all about.