Otherwise, you ll see the coppery glow of the building s skin, a layered, structural covering of metal and glass. The modernist dictum, form follows function, is not a stuffy law that guided the organization of this building, or a clue with which to read it. The function almost literally stands before us in the model. The rigorous, abstract geometry of the library design expresses the program, and little else. It is, to use one of Koolhaas favorite words, brutal.
Form follows function.
The program for a large municipal library in the information age is a complex, fascinating puzzle, full of the practical, the futuristic and the human. In other words, getting the program right may be exactly enough to justify the form. Rem Koolhaas and his firm, OMA, have made a career challenge of understanding the changing programmatic elements of this project type. Now that there is a real design commission at a real point in time, the form for the Seattle library quite simply follows that all-consuming interest. In the bound pages of the study that preceded the design concept for the building, the allocation of floor area for each separate function of the library appears in precise proportions like a many-colored, striped ribbon.