Rem Koolhaas, currently designing Seattle Public Library’s new 355,000-square-foot downtown library, has been named the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate for 2000. The award is known throughout the world as architecture’s highest honor, or the Nobel of architecture.” Koolhaas is principal and founder of The Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
“We are thrilled Rem has received this great honor,” said City Librarian Deborah L. Jacobs. “We know firsthand, the outstanding qualities of talent, vision and commitment he brings to a project. It is very exciting to have someone so widely respected and gifted in world architecture designing our central library.”
Jacobs said while it is still early in the two-year design project, Koolhaas has “captured the essence of what we are trying to do as a library. We gave him a detailed building program and he delivered on all the particulars. He listens so well and has been able to translate that information into a brilliant design.”
Koolhaas has said repeatedly that he considers the design for the Seattle Public Library one of the most important in his career.
“Even at this stage, I know what the new library will feel like to walk through,” Jacobs said. “Rem solves problems I don’t see being solved by other libraries, such as how to move around the collections and get a feeling that’s both intimate and spacious and how to encourage both silence and exuberance.”
One Seattle architecture critic has said the new $159 million downtown library has the potential to be the finest contemporary civic structure on the West Coast, surpassing the Getty complex in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the libraries of Phoenix and Vancouver, B.C.
Koolhaas will be presenting current work on the new downtown Seattle Public Library at a free public presentation at 2 p.m. Wednesday, May 3, Benaroya Hall, 200 University St., S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium. Everyone is welcome. Seating will be available on a first-come, first-served basis. The library is slated to open in 2003. J. Carter Brown, Pritzker Prize jury chairman, said Koolhaas is widely respected as “one of the most gifted and original talents in world architecture. The leader of a spectacularly irreverent generation of Dutch architects, his restless mind, conceptual brilliance and ability to make a building sing have earned him a stellar place in the firmament of contemporary design.”
The formal presentation of the Pritzker Prize will take place in a ceremony in Jerusalem, Israel on May 29, 2000. Koolhaas will receive a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion. He is the first Pritzker Laureate from the Netherlands and the 23rd to be honored. More than 500 nominees from approximately 40 countries are considered each year. Philip Johnson was the first Pritzker Laureate in 1979. Sir Norman Foster, now Lord Foster, of the UK was the 1999 Laureate.
The present jury is composed of Brown, director emeritus of the National Gallery of Art and chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts; Giovanni Agnelli, chairman of Fiat from Torino, Italy; Ada Louise Huxtable, author and architecture critic of New York; Jorge Silvetti, chairman, department of architecture, Harvard University Graduate School of Design; and Lord Rothschild, former chairman of the National Heritage Memorial Fund of Great Britain and formerly the chairman of that country’s National Gallery.
For detailed information on the Pritzker Prize and Koolhaas’ work, including full color images, go to: www.pritzkerprize.com on the World Wide Web. For information on the Library’s capital building program, visit the Library’s Web site at: www.spl.org and select Libraries for All. The Libraries for All Web site includes a News Articles archive.
(For more information, call Andra Addison, communications director, at 206-386-4103, or andra.addison@spl.org.)
Return to the list of Libraries for All press release headlines
Content modified: 17 April 2000
12/30/2005
© 1999-2006 - The Seattle Public Library