Best known for it’s seemingly endless red corridor on Level 4 – Seattle Central Library is an eleven storey, y2k architectural dream, that feels like it was purposely built for a ‘Backrooms’ experience. Inside, the escalators drop you into color drenched rooms that contrast the minimal – almost sterile – looking rows of books, with Levels 6 – 9 being a continuous spiral of shelves without a staircase. It features numerous reading rooms, all soft and fluorescent in design, as well as the ominous sounding ‘Mixing Chamber’, that is simply an open plan community space under vast diamond grid of glass and steel, designed to encourage interaction. The quietness of the space only adds to the fever dream feel of a building that really does seem like it was built to be a threshold.
Key features include:
- Diamond steel-and-glass skin over floating platforms
- Level 4 ‘Red Floor’: contains thirteen shades of red and pink
- Book spiral on Levels 6–9
- Mixing Chamber & reading rooms
- About 1.45 million items; 400-plus public computers
Photo credits: “” by Franklin Heijnen, CC BY-SA 2.0 , “red level seattle library” by Jessica Opalinski, Public Domain Dedication (CC0) , “seattle_public_library_15” by m o, CC BY 2.0 , “Empty Bookshelves – Seattle Central Library” by J Brew, CC BY-SA 2.0 , “” by Franklin Heijnen, CC BY-SA 2.0 , “” by Franklin Heijnen, CC BY-SA 2.0 ,
