Seattle Central Library - A Library Made of Glass

Photo: Han Zheng, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)

A stop on Seattle Pike Place and Downtown, a free self-guided tour.

Walk around this building and it barely looks like a library: a stack of tilted glass-and-steel boxes wrapped in a diamond-shaped net. Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA designed it with Seattle's LMN Architects, and it opened on May 23, 2004.

It's a public library, so you're welcome to wander in. Ride the lime-yellow escalators up and notice how each level has its own personality. The fourth floor is famously red, with walls, floors and ceilings painted in 13 shades of red, a bit like walking through the inside of a heart. Higher up, the Books Spiral holds the nonfiction collection on one continuous gentle ramp from the sixth to the ninth floor, so the shelves run in Dewey Decimal order without ever being split between floors.

Keep going to the tenth-floor reading room for views through the slanted glass toward Elliott Bay. Hours vary by day, so check the library's website before you go in.

Getting here: Walk north on Second Avenue to Madison Street, turn right and climb two steep blocks to Fourth Avenue. The library fills the block between Madison and Spring.

Did you know?: The library's skin is made of nearly 10,000 panes of glass, many of them custom-sized to fit its slanted, angled walls.

Photo op: Cross to the west side of Fourth Avenue and look up to catch the overhanging glass levels against the sky.

More on Wikipedia: Seattle Central Library · Rem Koolhaas · Office for Metropolitan Architecture · LMN Architects

Seattle Central Library - A Library Made of Glass

Stops on this tour