By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
The New York architect and partner in charge of Seattle’s new downtown Central Library, Joshua Ramus, knows that the Office of Metropolitan Architecture built the most in-your-face library this country has seen to date, and he’s not apologizing.
And if the politically correct sensibilities of the Northwest’s city by the bay recoil at the edgy design inspired by world-renowned, award winning Dutch architect, Rem Koolhaas, then he says, “Bring it on.”
“I think the building is really threatening to a lot of people,” said Ramus in a phone interview with the JTNews from his office at the OMA in New York. “It’s thrown in the face of traditional architecture that says responsibility is boring.”
The new public space, with its oddly-angled slopes and jutting façades of shimmering glass and steel, does look somewhat thrown into the downtown Seattle core, like an heir to the Trump fortune attending a labor rally.
But the 34-year-old Bainbridge Island native fiercely defends his adherence to the “form follows function” school of design. He will not be denied OMA’s achievement in the Emerald City along with the additional benefit of his mentor, Koolhaas’s resurrected global reputation.
“By being really dogmatic it created something that, as a by-product, was awe-inspiring,” he said. “In 2003-2004, we’ll have seven buildings open.”
The young OMA principal is not afraid of the critics. And those he views as slaves to the traditional do not intimidate him. “This is going to shake up the corporate structure in America,” he said.
Including the underground parking garage, the 412,000 square-foot building occupies a full downtown city block. The exterior design employs the use of both expansive sloping planes as well as cantilevered overhangs of vast diamond-patterned steel and glass grid walls that required 9,944 panes.
Some of the grid’s diamond shaped-windows are as high as seven feet at their tallest, and four feet wide at their widest section. There is embedded metal mesh within the triple-glazed glass that is designed to reduce glare and heat.
In the Young Adult section, library patrons can enter individual sound domes where they can blast music for their own enjoyment and not worry about disturbing the person right next to them. Special computers decode Braille for the blind and others read Web pages out loud.
“It competes with buildings like the Experience Music Project,” added Ramus. “Every decision in the building came out of practical performance. Everyone kept saying, ‘we’re not going to spend X-million dollars finding beauty if people can’t find a book.’ But the beauty was robust and of a high enough quality so that people knew how we spent their money. It was built on budget and on time.”
Critics of the bold, off-center-looking building were quick to point out what they saw as safety and security failings that lurk throughout on almost every floor. In particular, waist-high railings that provide a modicum of protection from plunging drops to floors below; diamond-grid walls that extend horizontally out from the floor slanting slightly upwards and easily tempting any and all children to climb; exposed diagonally placed steel support beams; signage too difficult to see and monochromatic floor-to-ceiling colors in some rooms and passageways that didn’t allow patrons to distinguish one from the other – to name a few.
Ramus has read it all and remains unfazed.
“I know what the Achilles heels are of this project,” answered Ramus. “I think there are some significant criticisms, but so far no one has hit them.”
The Yale undergrad in philosophy and former Olympic rowing team hopeful can hold his own. He says he’s accustomed to achieving and competing in cutthroat environments.
Ramus trained between eight and 10 hours a day while in graduate school at Harvard School of Design and competed in the Olympic trials held in Austin, Texas in June 1996. He went as far as the semi-finals, but didn’t make the team. After recuperating in Australia for a month or so he joined Koolhaas in OMA’s Rotterdam office.
Giving up on his athletic dream was tough, Ramus confessed, but he always knew he wanted to be an architect, even when he was studying Kant and Hagel. His grandfather, a civil engineer, raised him with books on trigonometry and algebra. The connection between math and design shaped his emerging talent.
“In the past, people were always aware of the ingenuity of a great civil engineer,” said Ramus, reminiscing about the influence his grandfather had on his life. “A great dam, a great bridge, a great freeway – they were beautiful projects.”
Ramus believes that to be a well-rounded person, it takes more than skills alone. It requires awareness. That’s why he didn’t major in architecture when he started out in school.
“Your undergraduate work should be a time to think and express yourself,” said Ramus.
It’s easy to see what the introspective young boy, who was relocated to grade schools in Georgetown as a young child, needed to think about. The son a of Jewish mother and a Catholic father, a civil rights lawyer and Duke University professor of Marine Biology respectively, he’s never really been sold on either religion.
While his Judaism is a curiosity to many of his friends, Ramus continues to reflect long and hard about what the beliefs of his family ultimately mean for his life.
“I am ex-communicated on both sides of my family,” said Ramus. “My mother’s grandparents were Orthodox Jews, but it’s not something that is in my mother’s life. And on my grandfather’s side they are Catholic but my father has been to Israel several times. I went to Saturday school when I was quite young but my grandfather, who was a huge baseball fan said, ‘you can either play baseball or go to Saturday school.’”
Given that choice, Ramus chose the dugout.
“In the end, you need to shun any organized belief system,” Ramus said. “Define those things that are immutable about your beliefs. Get to the kernel of your beliefs and stay true to it.”
Ramus currently lives in New York and is engaged to a Dutch woman he met in Rotterdam. They plan to set up residence in New York along with her two-year-old son.
Ramus’s parents now live in Poulsbo.