Hey!

I love the Pompidou!

Thanks for the link. Looking thru the other panels was like studying the relics of a pagan cult whose time had passed.

In the basement of Dartmouth’s library.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/Orozco/panel17.html

So, a bus station.

Because, you know, the third-world has not idea what ugly exposed plumbing looks like…

(The photos I saw of the outside do strike me as ghastly, I must say. Still: bright red and bright green & bright-everything are, as far as I’m concerned, Antidepressants In Paint. Which is a good thing.)

Roger!

Remember the library at Dartmouth????

The Orozco mural in the basement reserve room????

OK, Sports Fans, if you want to see something that REALLY has no place in a library, check out the Orozco mural. I used to sit in the basement and stare at the panel titled, as I recall, “The Birth of Sterile Knowledge,” and think: Why?

The Birth of Sterile Knowledge panel was a painting of a woman skeleton, attended by professors wearing long black robes, literally giving birth, from between her legs, to dead knowledge, which was pictured as little baby dead things (can’t remember if they were dead babies or dead baby skeletons) inside sealed plastic capsules.

We were supposed to do our reserve reading in front of this thing.

You can get a sense of it here:

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~library/Orozco/part2.html

All the photos I’ve seen of the library make it look much nicer than it actually is. You never get that ice-cold retro superfuture Ikea feeling when you’re actually IN the building; it’s more like a depressing Stalinist warehouse. It’s symptomatic of what’s wrong with Seattlites — it’s ugly, cold, and soulless.

I understand the reasoning behind the idea of the Central Library. The library should be for the Masses, a resource and meeting place for All. To that end, they don’t want to make the place too intimidating; they don’t want the library to be a place of elite learning, symbolic of all that was ever wrong with Western Civilization. So they make the same mistake that any self-righteous, condescending elitist has always made when creating something for the “little people,” of underestimating humanity. They end up getting everything absolutely wrong. A library SHOULD be grand, SHOULD be imposing. When I walk up its steps and through its great solid doors, I should feel as if I’m entering a cathedral. A world of knowledge, symbolic of that ideal greatness of man, of the striving for something bigger and better than what we are. I want to be overwhelmed with beauty and history and become excited about the possibilities of the future.

What we have instead is possibly the world’s most expensive homeless shelter.

If I may summarize your post: overpriced, dysfunctional, architectural sadism. Hmmm, sounds like “modern” architecture all right.

It will be interesting to see how the building looks in ten years. I’m betting on leaks and high maintainence costs, leading to an overall shabby, rundown look.