Seattle Public Library - Central Library
Diamond-gridded glass tower whose exposed steel mesh doubles as seismic bracing for five cantilevered floating platforms.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Seattle's Central Library traces the design by Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus of OMA, working with structural engineers Magnusson Klemencic Associates and Arup, who decided the building's diagonal steel mesh should be more than a shell and made it load-bearing instead, resisting wind and seismic force directly. It follows how that choice let five separate platforms appear to float inside the building, one cantilevered fifty-two feet past the columns beneath it on sloped supports engineered to counterbalance the load. You'll hear about the excavation trouble and late redesign that complicated construction along the way. Look up at the diamond-gridded net overhead as you walk through the atrium.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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