CITIES HAVE IMAGINATIONS. LIKE PEOPLE, they generate dream versions of themselves, fantasies they broadcast in tourist brochures, newspaper columns, world's fairs, urban plans, and major building programs. Jean Godden perfects her long, thin portraits of this "most livable city," a Seattle full of lattes and clever license plates, local slogans and all the neatly contained small-town intrigue of a transplanted Peyton Place. Meanwhile, developers envision and carry out the "revitalization of downtown"--Westlake Center, Benaroya Hall, the expanded Convention Center, Pacific Place--a semi-privatized shopper's paradise actualizing our

newest dream self: a "world-class city." The meager residue of Seattle's 110 years of urban give-and-take dissolves in the powerful solvent of placeless, international shopping. On the verge of the 21st century, Seattle has become cosmopolitan, displacing its scrawny, peculiar downtown with the celestial cartoon realm of a fantastic, transplantable urbanity: J. Crew, NikeTown, Planet Hollywood, the Disney Store. Isn't this the city we've been dreaming of?

We are asked to imagine the city again and again. 1878: "Brick buildings are being erected; expensive, thorough and valuable improvements are being made upon the streets; coal mines are being opened and successfully worked; and the first section of the Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad is almost built. With this road completed to Walla Walla, the dullest mind can easily see that Seattle will soon become the very foremost City north of San Francisco." (This rail line was never completed.)

1883:

"Q-ueen City of this Northwest, thou

U-nrivaled vantages dost hold;

E-nchain thy golden chance just now,

E-lse soon will flee thy chance of gold;

N-one then so poor as to thee bow!

C-ourage be thine, thou city fair!

I-mpel thy claims, they must be met;

T-he terminus no matter where,

Y-our place is in the center yet."

In 1909, the Yukon-Pacific Exposition builds a temporary city on the hill, a fantasy Arcadia that becomes the University of Washington. In 1911, Virgil Bogue's civic center plan mimics the fountains of Rome and the great boulevards of Paris, dreaming Seattle as a grand, new European capital. A Seattle friend of Alice B. Toklas writes to the famous American expatriate, "I hear Paris is the Seattle of Europe." The labor unions dream Seattle as a worker's utopia, taking control of the city for three days in 1919, displacing owners and government with a worker-run city, a fleeting dream lost in time. The 1962 World's Fair announces the dreams of the "Jet City," new home to the 21st century. By 1974, the 90-year-old label of Queen City has been discarded--too faggy and flat--and the Chamber of Commerce pronounces Seattle "The Emerald City," a dream conjured by an ad agency. That same year, the mayor's Seattle 2000 project turns 10 months of public hearings into a book-length portrait of the city's ambitions for the next century: community, sustainability, convenience, economic security--all of the virtues of the "most livable city." This has been Seattle's dream of itself for 25 years, a narrow, middle-class fantasy that is neatly consonant with our most exclusionary and hostile policies toward the transient and poor.

Seattle is a divergent, impermanent, polyglot metropolis of three million people, an unwieldy, stratified babble of mixed language, race, and class, whose imagination of itself has not kept up with its urban reality. Rather like a sprawling, conflicted teenager stubbornly dragging himself off to baseball practice every day (god forbid the yawning chasm of solitude should open up and give birth to doubt), we repeat our mantras of civic identity over and over, pursue them more and more vigorously, as our self-doubt grows about the nature of who we are. We lack the means to reimagine the city, and that is the core of an urban crisis.

And so, in this dark hour, an intriguing and very promising anomaly presents itself near the heart of our "revitalized downtown." Walk inside the main branch of the public library and you'll find the real city, a population that's been erased from the fantasy blocks sparkling just beyond the exit doors. Kids, addicts, mothers, assholes, and oldsters of every race and class stake claims as robust and productive as those made on the rest of downtown by Planet Hollywood, NikeTown, and GameWorks. The library is not alone, but it is the only institution where such broad inclusiveness remains uncontested. While other places may approach its richness and variety--Pike Place Market, Westlake, the Seattle Center, Gas Works Park--their openness is won at the cost of recurring political battles pitting the importance of free access against the presumed risks of unregulated public space. Who has the right to use the public parks? Are transients welcome in "private/public" spaces like Pacific Place? Who can use the sidewalks? Should the Market restrict its vendors and musicians? But no argument needs to be made in defense of the public library--open access is its sine qua non, its essential condition, its mission.

This point was made by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas during his visit last month, competing for the contract to design our new downtown library, a project that offers Seattle its best opportunity to recognize and engage the sprawling chaotic reality of its evolving urban condition. The library offers Seattle a laboratory in which our failing imagination can be rekindled, catalyzed by a frank, ambitious inquiry into the possible forms the 21st-century downtown library should take. Koolhaas, who ultimately won the contract, is the only architect in the world who can lead such a far-reaching inquiry. This project is of the utmost importance, a collaborative investigation into the urban condition that can help awaken the city from its muffled, narrow dreams.

RIPE CITY

In the building history of Seattle, the new library will be a modest event--355,000 square feet of floor space on a city block, a $156 million project scheduled for completion by summer 2003--but it comes at an auspicious moment. Seattle, flush with money, is enjoying a bold new self-regard. The funding directed toward the construction of the new library itself is unprecedented. Beyond our passage of the country's largest-ever library bond, donors, including Bill Gates and Paul Allen, have chipped in $56 million so far. And like a 13-year-old inspecting his new clothes in the mirror, local media have given the project a prominence usually reserved for sports contracts and Seafair. The Seattle Times alone published a dozen articles about the selection process (while managing to get nearly everything about Koolhaas dreadfully wrong). Three different editorialists speculated on what the choice to hire Koolhaas says about our city. If the inquiry he's about to lead us through constitutes a kind of civic psychoanalysis (and I believe it does), the good news is the patient is alive and at last thinking about his problems.

Seattle's peculiar urban conditions have also ripened terrifically in the last five years. Fertilized with the manure of big money and bathed in the heat of developers' hubris, the city has been bold enough to fund projects such as Pacific Place, the Convention Center expansion, and the sports stadiums--buildings that loudly announce our willingness to aggravate the suffering of the disenfranchised in favor of expanded middle-class comforts. Tensions that used to be masked by timidity or lack of funds are now amplified and made fully visible in the built environment. Given the benign rhetoric that has always accompanied Seattle's most hostile assaults on the transient and poor, we are lucky to be approaching this project at a time when city planning and statutory law so loudly announce the values behind the rhetoric: Downtown is for shopping; the library alone is for free.

Further, the library board and new head librarian Deborah Jacobs have managed to activate one of the most successful public processes in recent memory. After one failed campaign, the library regrouped, enlisting hundreds of volunteers, soliciting suggestions from tens of thousands of patrons, and conducting over 300 public meetings in 22 neighborhoods throughout the city. All of this was in preparation for a bond measure which ultimately passed by a 72 percent margin. The fallout of this remarkable enlistment of public support is that Seattleites feel a deep stake in the outcome of the design process. At Koolhaas' two-day visit, overflow crowds of 700 and then 1,000 packed Benaroya Hall and the Sheraton Ballroom just to hear what he, New York architect Steven Holl, and Portland's Bob Frasca had to say.

CHOOSING AN ARCHITECT

Like most major civic commissions, the contract for the library was awarded after a long public process, beginning with an open call netting 29 applications from architects around the world. The list of 29 drew comment in both daily papers, astonished at the high caliber of the applicants. Notably, neither paper mentioned Rem Koolhaas in their summary "who's who." Next to Richard Meier, Robert A. M. Stern, Sir Norman Foster, Michael Graves, Moshe Safdie (who designed the Vancouver, BC library), I. M. Pei, and Bremerton native Steven Holl, the Dutch Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), which Koolhaas helped found, was relatively unknown, at least to the dailies. I served on the library's Architect Selection Advisory Panel, and Koolhaas was a familiar and broadly supported choice from the very first rounds. Many of the 14 panel members (a group of architects, librarians, builders, and library users) knew of OMA and were intrigued.

The panel's deliberations narrowed the field to five firms, two of which dropped out. Pritzker Prize-winner Sir Norman Foster objected to the library's request that each finalist name a Seattle firm as partner (too early to do that, he said); Cesar Pelli's firm complained that the "design problem" each finalist would be asked to work on was too vague and demanding, and that the library really ought to pay the airfare and hotel bills for finalists coming to Seattle. Despite the fact that our panel met and agreed with these objections--striking the required early partnering and offering to pay airfare and hotel fees, while also clarifying and narrowing the design problem for Pelli--in the end, neither firm could be drawn back into the competition. The remaining three--Koolhaas, Steven Holl, and Bob

Frasca--were invited to Seattle for three days of public presentations and private interviews. Anyone following the daily papers knows what came next: standing-room-only crowds for two public presentations, remarkably cogent and compelling analyses of the library's potential from Holl and Koolhaas, the panel's final recommendation that the library board go to Europe to look at buildings by these two, then the unanimous vote for Koolhaas.

Despite all that attention, the city (at least its newspapers) knows scarcely more about Koolhaas than we did three months ago. O. Casey Corr continues to publish the most baffling nonsense in The Seattle Times. Rather than read any of the 2,000 or so published pages of Koolhaas' work, or make some assessment of his buildings, Corr has been content to dote on the "rock star quality" of his public appearances and spend a one-hour interview inspecting his choice of shoes and jacket. Corr's conclusion: "After a century at Sears [Seattle is] switching to Giorgio Armani." The Seattle Weekly's Eric Scigliano warns that Koolhaas may deliver a Robert Venturi-like SAM disaster, all crazy ornament and visual trickery, despite, well, despite everything Koolhaas has ever written or designed. Such ham-fisted analysis is the intellectual equivalent of our new downtown shopping: Armani, Oldham, Mizrahi, whatever--it's all famous, world-class stuff, the attractions and off-putting excesses interchangeable, no matter the name.

KOOLHAAS

Koolhaas is, in fact, unlike any of the other 28 applicants for the library contract. Here is an architect who closed his first Seattle talk insisting, "If architecture is worthy of anything, it is worthy of disrespect," whose assistants speak eloquently about the challenge of "planning to lose control" of the design process, and who praises the pressure and conflicts that prevent the architect from having his way. "Every culture has its own frustrations and its own danger areas," he told an interviewer. "And architecture is the perfect means of bringing these to light."

To understand this habit of mind (Koolhaas hesitates when I suggest that what he does constitutes a method--"It is not something which we [OMA] have codified"), it helps to go back to the late 1970s and the publication of Koolhaas' first book, Delirious New York, which he called a "retroactive manifesto for Manhattan." In it he theorized a "culture of congestion" thriving in the porous grid structure of Manhattan, which by overwhelming and frustrating the perfect plans of architects, nurtures the most fecund density of lives and buildings in Europe or America. Documenting the creation of this congested grid city involved excavating the 300-year history of New York's imagination of itself. As in psychoanalysis, one critical element was to inspect the lies the city told about itself (from early inflated European sales pitches, to Arcadian skyscraper dreams, to the funhouse mirror of Coney Island) and take them seriously as a kind of wish fulfillment. The historical acuity of this research alone was overwhelming. Comical, ironic, and impeccably researched, Delirious New York embodied the precarious marriage of idealism and pragmatism which gives Koolhaas' writing, and his buildings, their central tension.

In conversation, Koolhaas describes himself as "perpetually torn between realism and a kind of speculative fervor." Transiting between these two produces a design process that is dialectical, marked by periods of intense, broadly inclusive research, and the production of bold speculative models that can be tested against the research. The result--the residue of this process--is not only a building design, but also an exhaustive knowledge of the site and context of the project, the urban condition.

This is not to imply that Koolhaas never thinks about the materials or practicalities of buildings. In fact, his design choices are thoughtful and pragmatic. They reflect a personality that delights in thrift; in simple, exposed solutions to complex problems; in the frank, visible use of structural materials like concrete, plywood, or plastic. He lets us peek--often through compromised lines or clouded materials--at what would otherwise be hidden. His buildings activate a seductive dialectic between luxury and self-denial. It's often surprising, even unsettling, to discover that a narrow, plain chair in a Koolhaas building is comfortable. An insubstantial curtain becomes a massive wall. Smooth, varnished plywood warms and softens a slightly skewed room. A concrete incline draws the lost wanderer gently toward a resting place.

Koolhaas seems to have an almost physiological aversion to polarities, habitually collapsing presumed opposites into uneasy marriages. An intellectual famous for theorizing the urban condition, he muffles his own theoretical concerns under such an avalanche of pragmatism and contingent problem-solving, they find no obvious symbolic expression in the material form of his buildings. He continually talks of "the real"--in essence a phenomenological "real" (though again he bristles at my suggestion: "It's more of a floating kind of journalistic 'real,' nothing Heidegarian")--but he does not contrast it with what we conventionally might call the artificial. Manhattan, one of this century's greatest triumphs of the built environment over geography, is for Koolhaas an exemplary case of "the real." Over and over he forces contradictions into shotgun resolutions--frustration is realization, pure beauty is ugliness, chaos is promising, temporariness is a permanent condition. He refuses the distinction between form and function ("a false division," he called it during his talk in Seattle), suggesting "performance" as a linguistically clever intermediary station marrying those two false poles.

"Performance" offers a capacious home, inside of which Koolhaas' apparently contrarian thinking resolves into clarity. If we look at the city as an ongoing event--a shifting, ever-changing performance that has been shaped (sometimes enabled, sometimes hindered) by the built environment--then all conventional dichotomies dissolve; one is simply immersed in the density and complexity of "the real." In the midst of action, in the scenario of our days, there is no boundary between idea and material, no division between form and function. Only critics, or ambitious architects, need to create dichotomies, as tools with which they may simplify and then design against the overwhelming phenomena of the city. Koolhaas' core gesture is, instead, to surrender to these phenomena and their contingencies, to endeavor to design in concert with the give-and-take, the contradictions and confusions of "the real."

"What I find embarrassing about architecture," Koolhaas tells me, "is that it's a kind of intelligence exclusively directed at modifying a situation; it does not have reticence or abstinence in its repertoire. An architect is expected to change everything radically or almost beyond recognition, and if he doesn't, he's thought to have failed to be an architect. I think there are other responses that may be more intelligent." This radical shift brings with it an avalanche of small changes in the design process. The architect's work becomes a kind of civic psychoanalysis, initiating enough meaningful conversations with the client and the site to liberate layers of history, of repressed conflict, and to invigorate streams of action that will demand expression in the performance of the building. As Koolhaas describes it, "I think my greatest quality is staging the creative process. I'm able to link, compose, and question certain subjects, and to generate an inventory of possibilities which can then be tested against the research until they break."

Koolhaas has portrayed his dizzying free-fall into this "culture of congestion" with all the elegiac melancholy of a fall from grace. He is a man still haunted by the promise of Modernism's great utopian visions, even as he lives and works amid the wreckage of their failures. Over and over in his writings--most of them collected in a massive collaborative book called S,M,L,XL--Koolhaas identifies May 1968 as a kind of terminal moment in Eden. The failure, and the overwhelming ambition, of that generation's utopian visions (particularly those of the French Situationists, whose manifestos and street-actions helped student protesters take over the city of Paris for a few days in May '68) mark our expulsion into a permanent twilight of failed idealism.

Even as Koolhaas celebrates the fecundity and vitality of the congested "real," his work is haunted by this failure. Robert Maxwell characterizes this quality, in writing about OMA, as "a quasi-historical modernity which harks back to the decade of the '20s in Russia and in America. It recalls the abstractions of Malevich and Lissitzky, the idealities of Chernikov and Leonidov, the sensuous, wayward, and episodic in a way that has not been seen since the early days. All that strange variety of modern architecture... returns now in OMA to haunt us with the possibilities of a future we had already thought was over."

COLLIDING PATHS

It is uncanny how completely the trajectory of Koolhaas' intellectual and professional development has pointed toward the challenge of designing a library for Seattle at the dawn of the 21st century. I believe Koolhaas himself does not yet realize the importance of this project, as a catalyst for evolution in his own thinking, and as an opportunity to discover a new form for the library--an institution that is still largely defined by the residue of its 3,000 year history. The library will be a radically changed entity within the next 25 to 50 years, and Rem Koolhaas working in Seattle next year represents our best chance to discover what that entity, that event, will be.

His lively commitment to a program of inquiry, a civic psychoanalysis, may also help the city engage more fully with its own hidden conflicts. Behind its brave cosmopolitan face, Seattle plays host to a vast ecosystem of submerged streams of culture. Cultural conflict (with all its positive richness) may appear to be nearly absent, when in fact it has merely slipped away into a kind of deeply layered disappearance (in rather the same way the city's many creeks and spawning streams have receded underground, hidden beneath the assertions of our built environment). This pattern is repeated everywhere in the city's life. Aurora Avenue becomes a Korean enclave; 2,000 Persians move to Bellevue; a Hispanic community larger and more permanent than any north of San Francisco settles in White Center and South Park; Tukwila, SeaTac, Burien, and the rest of the south end become saturated enclaves of recently arrived Pacific and East Asians--and all go unnoticed. Meanwhile, the youth of Seattle, of whatever ethnicity, create and export a near-endless stream of lively cultural expressions that go completely unrecognized until discovered and embraced elsewhere. The opportunity to disappear in this city is open to anyone with little enough money, a native tongue other than English, or a birthday after 1978.

This is not all bad. With the city's public self lost in its dreams of livability--of more convenient shopping and better sports stadiums--a million peculiar lives are lived in the still-ample margins, a shadow city which is nevertheless relatively well-off and remarkably productive. And this is the very city that fills our libraries. At the center of the collective fantasy we call our "revitalized downtown," there lies a great crowded splotch of the city's transient, polyglot richness. The library is the city's repressed reality--more like L.A. than San Francisco, chaotic, conflicted beyond our understanding--and we now have a chance to engineer a kind of return of the repressed.

We all have our subterranean histories, our lists of demands. Among many other things, kids and youth advocates need to ask for an all-ages venue and resource center for youth, providing all the tools to carry out the cultural life the city has dismantled through its statutory restrictions on commerce involving kids. If the city presumes to protect teenagers from the hazards of unregulated commerce, it must provide the means for them to nevertheless produce their own culture, under the auspices of the city. The library is the appropriate place for this facility. The homeless and homeless advocates must demand that the library be made fully accessible to them and offer the resources relevant to their lives, and that this accommodation be made in a deliberate and intelligent way, so that library staff are not forced to function as social workers confronting behaviors and needs they are neither trained nor paid to deal with.

All our wishes must be articulated in the coming year, forced into the discussion of the public library so that the city develops the most capacious, most "real" civic institution in its history. Koolhaas can help make that happen.