I thought Tate Modern was amazing. It opened shortly before I started living in London, and during the time I lived there, I admired its exterior brutalism and its interior refinement – it was as if someone had just taken art gallery design to a wild and civilised height.
It remained my favourite modern building for ages – aside from some work by Tadao Ando and others – and then today I heard about Seattle Central Library and Tate Modern came second.
Inside the library, floors don’t hug the exterior wall, crayon colours give distinction to important focal points like starcases and escalators, and reading rooms are given a surfeit of natural light. A photo gallery on this page gives some idea of its essential qualities.
Inside are vast spaces — library officials admit the acoustics won’t be great — and bright colors: vivid-yellow escalators, lipstick–red hallways.
And there are floors and floors of books, with a system of sorting the nonfiction collection into a four–story “book spiral,” unheard–of anyplace else in the country.
The 363,000–square–foot building has 11 stories and will nearly double the amount of books that were available at the temporary library near the Washington State Convention & Trade Center.
With a brilliant designer, construction and budget glitches aside, it’s a superb building and I don’t see why I shouldn’t go and live in it right away. *grin*
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