When the Seattle Public Library hired Rem Koolhaas to invent its new Central Library, it got an architect, an artist and an urban thinker. Nothing could be more potentially dangerous in sleepy architectural Seattle.

Last December, Koolhaas's brain deposited a totally unexpected idea for a library building as giant sliding platforms stretching a golden mesh into a zigzag sculpture 12 stories tall.

A deafening silence ensued. Praise for the architect and his explanation. Praise for the library's courage. But silence on the imagined building itself.

Since then, a few pointed questions distracted the conversation and found their way into the newspapers: How much Windex do you need to clean the glass walls? Or can you see up a woman's dress through the translucent floors? Is this the most cost-effective way to spend taxpayer's money for a place to store and check out books?

No more avoiding the question. Koolhaas's prismatic vision 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.

Surrounded by downtown Seattle's darker towers of offices and hotels, the new glowing lantern of glass will rise on the same block as the existing library and open to the public in 2003. The future library will be 72% larger in floor space and nearly three times as tall on 4th Avenue, but still a midget compared to the black box of the former Seafirst Building across the street.

Koolhaas performed a daring act antithetical to the normal, slow moving design process by presenting a whole vision very early and all at once. It is like a design competition entry, submitted after you won. As a result, the vision appears complete, but is actually preliminary.

To imagine the new building, think of crystals or prisms or chunky paperweights. Visualize expansive sheets of clear, colored and opaque glass support by a diamond shaped grid or "space frame" of steel tubes.

In your mind, picture a glass shed roof covering the existing library parking lot between Madison and the top of the building. The glass and steel tubes of that roof will bend like paper origami and become a sloping wall on 5th Avenue all the way to Spring. Inside, a three-story sunlit lobby will welcome all visitors.

Floating above, like a closed book lying on its side, the next three floors hold hundreds of thousands of books. The library stacks will grow from 800,000 books today to 1.4 million in 25 years.

At seven stories, the grand reading room spreads across the top of the hovering volume of stacks. Readers will sit in comfy chairs under the glass roof and occasionally survey the northern sky filled with downtown towers like Rainier Square, Washington Mutual and Hotel W.

A final floating platform zags back to the south creating a roof terrace with views over the Federal Courthouse to Mt. Rainier and St. James Cathedral.

From the courthouse steps on a sunny August morning, the tilting planes of glass will reflect themselves, the city and sky in complex ways. Gray days will cause less reflection and the grid of pipes will texture the walls into a carved pattern like Waterford crystal.

In the dark evenings after work in winter, it will be magnificent. The massive weight of the book collection will seem to float effortlessly. People will be coming and going everywhere- a transparent vision of Seattle's love of learning.

Whatever this building is, it can hardly be called normal.

It departs radically from Seattle's 20 years of repairing the streetscape with historic styles and strict "design guidelines" such as storefronts and awnings. It is not preconceived from some traditional or contemporary style. The architect is inventing for a new downtown Seattle.

In the two public presentations by Koolhaas, the audiences have been filled with the rising numbers of urban dwellers. In Seattle, they used to be just the artists and the poor. Now they include the techies, the traders, the designers and all the people who want to be part of this group.

For the new audience, the rules are different. Downtown has been saved, so urban preservation and re-vitalization are not priorities. Their interest is the invention of energized urban spaces, from calming green streets in Belltown and the open air of SAFECO Field and to the Man Ray video bar in Pike/Pine. Their mandate is to keep the energy flowing.

Even as the architect satisfies this emerging city center, Koolhaas's main energy has to be directed toward the needs of the clients: the library users and staff. To that end, he carefully considered the library's requirements ranging from book storage retrieval systems to the spatial qualities of public spaces.

City Librarian Deborah Jacobs remembers the personal shock of joy when she realized how brilliantly Koolhaas had met those requirements. The new library promises to be a whirling, egalitarian fusion of form and function, a new kind of public space invented to save the institution of the public library for another generation.

Facing the future of information and books electronically accessible from every living room and office cubicle, the Seattle citizen's could have voted for enhanced electronic networks and mail order books. We could have built an amazon.com library system with a friendly overlay of hundreds of librarians guiding users via telephone or computers to the information and books they desired. But we chose a new building.

This library will be urban and democratic. The public library is not the quiet study carrels of university libraries or comfy lounge chairs at Barnes and Noble. These calm, controlled places come with a price, that is, the cost of admission.

Free of charge is a beautiful and traditional tenant of the public library. Everybody is welcome who will follow library rules about consideration for others and materials. Contemporary users include homeless men, laughing teens, immigrants speaking many languages and harried parents dropping off a child.

Koolhaas's past work establishes him as a master of coordinating this messiness of many different kinds of people and activities. He conceived the library as a market, or rather a bazaar, for books, computers, lectures and coffee that augment the existing library of helpful reference librarians, children's story time and quiet reading nooks.

The details of the actual building layout are not due until May, but very preliminary drawing show a large children's only space off 4th Avenue that earlier had sloped floors. Browsing of newspapers and magazines are buried in the hill below the new 5th Avenue lobby with its art displays and coffee shop. The lobby escalator leads up to the auditorium and so-called "Mixing Room" where librarians can supervise the lobby below and assist others seeking books in the stacks above.

After passing through the stacks, the reading room is a quieter place protected from the activity below. The calming northern light will spread across the glass reading room except for the few minutes each sunny day when the evening's angled light shoots down Spring street to graze the space. A small pleasure to a daydreaming reader.

So many ideas abound in the limited drawings presented in December. The summer will be a season of reckoning as the Library and its patrons evaluate the priorities made in the face of economic realities.

For the record, no one can look up skirts through the floors, the amount of glass walls is less that the standard office building and it could be built cheaper. But to this critic, cheapening the quality is not the right direction for a primary institution of American democracy in the heart of the city.

For further information on the Library design by OMA: Seattle Public Library

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