The nice and the good: as a type, libraries may be in flux, but OMA's bold new building for Seattle is a quantum leap of architectural and municipal ambition.

In Iris Murdoch's novel, The Nice and the Good, the two qualities are not to be mistaken for one another. To be nice may, in fact, thwart the good. In the same spirit, the recently-completed Seattle Central Library is not nice. Instead, a stern methodology has borne a noble propaganda. First, a library is no less than a 'habitat for metamorphosis'. Second, a cheap great building is not an oxymoron.

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It conceives this library--a building type in flux if not outright danger--in a city with a robust and nice urban fabric that is a tectonic parallel of its brand of earnest humanism. 'It is time', Rem Koolhaas told a packed crowd on 3 May 2000, 'to decide whether you will become a real metropolis or not ... You will become a city, with all the splendours and miseries of that. And one of the responsibilities of that, obviously, is living with architecture.' Seattle said it could: in 1998, 70 per cent of the city's voters passed a $196.4 million library bond, the largest in American history. Given today's penchant for extreme visual stimuli, the new library needed to stand out to retain both any degree of civic authority and the ability to entice. A report released in July by the National Endowment for the Arts said reading in the US had declined across every demographic group, and correlated that decline with community involvement. Meanwhile, despite the isolation that technology enables, libraries are assuming urgent new roles of congregation and education. All told, a seductive challenge, especially for an OMA hungry for a major US commission.

To understand this project with its 'infinite number of obligations', it might help to realize that an eye for economy, together with an ingenious separation of programme functions--rendered in gorgeous colour bars in collaboration with Bruce Mau Design that recall Le Corbusier's vibrant colour keys--precipitated the stubby, irregular building shape outside. Inside, five separate boxes, each devoted to one use and with its own palette, meant only one problem to solve per box. A second round of mechanical and structural separations in each box and integrated back into the programmatic divisions led to improved performances and substantial initial and life-span savings: construction costs of the 33 722sq m structure were $110 million; fees, including consultant costs added another $45 million. This conspiracy of frugal strategies is expected to lead to a Silver LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) energy-efficient designation by the US Green Building Council, one of the city's 'obligations'.

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The vertical multi-coloured bars (see p50) are not just eye candy but keys to grasping the building in section: aligned bars represent fixed library functions; bars offset refer to mutable and public areas. If you draw lines from the corners of the offsets to the aligned colours, you get the basic outlines of the building, a graphic device also used in stainless-steel signage to establish a sense of place. (1)

Looking at the eccentric outline with its stretched diamond-shaped net seemingly thrown over the whole thing, you might think it a nod to Bruno Taut's Expressionist 1914 Glass Pavilion. Wrong. Stress diagrams by the structural engineers, Magnusson Klemencic Associates with Arup, showed that this particular lattice module uses the least steel most efficiently with fewest welds. Stress tests on the glass revealed an identical preferred shape. The module minimized union labour (two people could handle each piece) and maximized the amount a truck could carry, 'probably knocking off about $2 million', according to OMA project partner Joshua Ramus. For sunlit or horizontal surfaces, aluminium mesh was inserted into the double-insulated glass sandwich to mitigate the effects of interior daylight.

Because these concerns generated the pattern, it makes sense that the lattice doesn't always reconcile when meeting a new plane, emphasizing that function, not form, drives the agenda. Structurally, by relieving the internal steel structure of seismic and lateral loads, the lattice was freed of fireproofing requirements (eg, plasterboard) so eliminating all finishes except for paint. Gravity loads are sustained by exposed trusses and vertical columns, mostly concealed above the third floor where massive angled columns take over, providing wider sightlines and animating the spaces. Either way, columns are always pulled back from the corners so the boxes read as articulated volumes. The largest diagonal lines signify major public spaces such as the soaring Living Room, running in a broad swathe almost the length of the building. It contains the low, asymmetrically placed fiction stacks and a cafe. Echoing the greater Seattle geography, islands of materials respond to other needs--to be lazy, to browse, to do a quick bit of laptop. Carpet insets of orange and purple or green photo-realistic silk screens of plants by Koolhaas' partner, designer Petra Blaisse, or a shiny large black circle of high gloss coloured polyurethane (used in vibrant colours elsewhere), all float in a light-stained backdrop of end cuts of salvaged wood. On the west side, a narrow orange strip of space, perversely, is devoted to teenagers. Publicly accessible to those waiting for the lifts, it is the most regimented and most orthogonal part of the scheme.

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In the middle of the Living Room, a powerful bass note of the concrete core of the building flanks a 10-storey tall atrium. If the Living Room tethers you to water and land, the Reading Room on the 10th floor unleashes a user for flights of imagination in an atmosphere evoking cirrus clouds. Unrestrained views rise beyond the jutting, ice-blue glass envelope. There is a place here for Jonathan Pryce flapping his wings in Brazil, for Icarus, and even Jacques Tati in the brilliant red rubber lounge chairs that demand renting Playtime again. Overhead, white acoustic quilting squares attached to the administrative floor above not only absorb sound, but also house an array of mechanical needs, each square centred by a nozzle, spigot or light fixture to create a vast gridded cloudscape.

The third public space, the Mixing Chamber, is the reference area. Here, librarians wander as wireless information warriors amid users at phalanxes of black computers. Interchangeable squares of aluminium flooring, softer underfoot over time than you might expect, are screwed to raised plenums to accommodate inevitable changes in technological needs. Black-painted, fire-insulating foam on the ceilings and upper part of the white columns was dusted by glitter bought from the art store down the street, inflecting the cave-like area with a nightclubby gauze. Just a floor below, corridors, ceilings and walls (some erupting like a Claus Oldenburg sculpture) leading to the conference rooms are drenched in six shades of red, speaking to the body's requirements for passion, evacuation, or both.

The design's main event and the object of exhaustive effort is the expandable Book Spiral for the miles of 900 000 books. The parti is that of a concrete parking garage, with shelves perpendicular to a 2 degree switchback ramp calibrated to the walking pace of a disabled person. At a slightly sharper angle, placed about 1.5m apart, black rubber strips containing a part of the numerical sequence of the Dewey Decimal system line up with the corresponding shelves. Ceilings were held at 2.6m to prevent claustrophobia, but even so, the spiral's geometry required an ultra-compact ceiling-to-floor section. Because of the 'one problem per box' rule, the lower occupancy here required fewer air changes. Ductwork was eliminated in lieu of side-mounted jet nozzles. Purlins were placed 1.8m apart and directly above the shelves between cheap fluorescents, all covered with polycarbonate panels in one unfussy glowing plane. It diffuses light so well that light levels at the bottom of the bookshelves were higher than more expensive proprietary systems. (2)

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The ground floor on 4th Avenue with its soaring lattice overhead, creating a huge porte cochere, is where the happy but unchildish children's and English literacy areas are. This is compassionate programming for those who are least equipped to manoeuvre the library. Here, in the checkout and literacy area, is a brilliant example of contemporary ornament. Spreading like a sea of words, raised and reversed beds of wood type in 11 languages on the maple floor salute lines from the most beloved and checked-out-books. So, words unite us in sensual ways; artist Ann Hamilton expects worn paths to appear marking popular routes, like paths in the woods. In the best Ruskinian sense, the floor grounds the user in the community's collective memory and creates, to paraphrase Kent Bloomer and Henri Focillon, a 'habitat for metamorphosis' beyond art and building alone, just as the library does for Seattle.

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1 In fact, the entire building offers lessons in environmental psychology, seen in the subtle but redundant information in many textures on many planes. The brilliant chartreuse colour, for example, signals paths of travel. The green used in the men's rooms is so vile 'I almost didn't want to pee in there', one man was overheard to say: the rumour is that the anxiety-inducing shade is meant to thwart setting up home by the homeless, a significant population here.

2 This is only one aspect of a sophisticated, economical mechanical system devised by Arup. The library wanted to control ventilation for bodies and books, preventing the sour smell librarians vowed to avoid. Though a closed forced-floor air building, and dependent on a paradigm of regular energy resources, it exploits the tall, loosely connected spaces and boxes in a system of reuse, exhaust, recovery, conditioning air only where and when needed. Jets also regulate the surface temperature of the glass, induction lamps will last for ten years and so on.