OMA / Seattle Public Library (globalized studio typology)

The main theoretical alternative to [the largely structuralist conception of] totalities is what the philosopher Gilles DeLeuze calls assemblages, [that is] wholes characterized by relations of exteriority...assemblages are made up of parts which are self-subsistent [so] that a part may be detached and made am element of another assemblage. Assemblages are characterized along two dimensions: along the first dimension are specified the variable roles which the component parts may play, from a purely material role to a purely expressive one...a second dimension characterizes processes in which the components are involved processes which stabilize or destabilize the identity of the assemblage (territorialization and deterritorialization).  (De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society, 10-19)

Among the projects I analyzed in the fall, OMA's Seattle Public Library (SPL) façade details stood out as perfect tools to investigate the complexity inherent in the transnational cooperative agreements which parsed its design process. At the most fundamental level, take the fact that OMA is a Rotterdam-based firm, which (despite the presence of an American branch) chose to partner with a local design firm — Seattle-based LMN Architects — to complete this project; furthermore, as the design team coalesced it became increasingly split into several functional groups, one centered on OMA and their European manufacturing contacts (the former provided the parti for the building and massing models for early fundraising and the latter — Seele GmbH — fabricated the façade); a second focused on the concrete and steel of the central masses of the library (Hoffman Construction and Magnusson Klemencic Associates), and a third on the discreet programmatically-defined interior finishes and public procession through the building (LMN and Arup Services Division). This territorialization of subsets of the assemblage actually acts to destabilize the identity of the overall assemblage, I would argue.

Seattle Public Library design organization chart.

The ad-hoc team tasked with creating the SPL was a highly differentiated one, with many stratifications between the architects of record and the trades physicalizing the project; the clustering of the players into groups create what social and behavioral researcher Adele Clarke would refer to as discursive discontinuities rendering more difficult daily communications between the several functional clusters of the team.

Also manifest in the Seattle Central Library is a moment where the separation between various organizational players is expressed in a materially constructed hiccough. In this case, the European cluster vetted out a precise scheme for the diagrid skin which was, purportedly, to be self-supporting. The images below show that at some point long after the original decision for self-supporting skin was made, someone on the ground realized that in the case of extremely large spans, the façade would need secondary reinforcement (notice the final interior finishes in place  furniture already being moved in while the lateral reinforcement pieces are still unfinished and partially connected :: afterthought). Magnusson Klemencic was asked to come up with a lateral reinforcement scheme, as the primary structure was their scope. The result is visible below: awkwardly placed wide flange steel members, a singular form visible nowhere else in the project, welded (sometimes flange-to-web, sometimes flange-to-flange) to the façade without any articulation of of the column where it hits the diagrid.

This underdetailed moment is my insertion point; this is a material connection which intones and expresses communicative failure within the design organization, and does so at precisely the moment when canonical architecture expresses itself most elegantly. Where the rib-groin vault of the gothic cathedral displays openly the transition from lateral to vertical force flow, becoming the purely expressive components De Landa discusses, the matchsticks of the Seattle Public Library obfuscate the very physical transition they are instantiated to address.

OMA's most expressive contribution is the basic building partí, a programmatic shuffle summarized in the diagram below. If the expressive capacity of the architect is embodied in making a generative sketch so simple as to be universally recognizable in perpetuity, what claim have we to authentic creation of urban space? Of memorial iconography? Of phenomenology? These are the scopic diaspora of the globalized design studio, tools of the architectural profession pushed out of contemporary practices' focus ever further as the designing assemblage grows.