Someone's finally stepped up to the plate, publishing the first on-record dis of Rem Koolhaas' design for the new downtown library. The Seattle Times, which has hedged its opinions in its unsigned editorials, ran an opinion piece by Susan Nielsen on December 23 headlined, "Shhhh, my little parakeets, the library has no clothes." Nielsen calls the preliminary design "hideous, like a giant rabbit cage built by Timothy Leary." She starts off with conventional know-nothing tropes, saying local architects only say they love the design because "they'd sound like hicks if they didn't," and that fans of the design "think the words avant garde are European for 'You Americans are such suckers.'"

This is boilerplate -- similar words have been dumped on everything from Robert Venturi's Seattle Art Museum to Frank Gehry's unfinished Experience Music Project. It's when Nielsen gets to her specific critiques that she goes off the deep end. Nielsen's three main beefs: Koolhaas' translucent floors will make skirt-wearing visitors vulnerable to panty-peepers; sloping floors will cause problems for wheelchair users (hold the phones -- ramps are harder than stairs on the handicapped?!); and Koolhaas trivializes the role of books in a library, viewing other media as complements, not threats. This, at last, is a charge that could stick. As my friend (and Koolhaas proponent) Matthew Stadler suggested to me, a library where musty books are not allowed to molder in peace -- each awaiting the day it becomes suddenly crucial -- is no library at all. But books will always have a prominent place at our new, oddball library, despite what Nielsen reports. So her entire piece is trash. Better luck next time.

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Moving vans are circling Pioneer Square, waiting to move Soil to new digs on Capitol Hill (at 12th and Pike) and Foto Circle and Oculus from the doomed Washington Shoe Building to the current Artspace location on Alaskan Way. Congrats to all three alternative spaces for surviving the redevelopment carnage in their neighborhood.

Send gossip and complaints to eric@thestranger.com.