ABSTRACT
The success of the work of Rem Koolhaas and his firm OMA rests strongly on the implicit or explicit claim to be an architecture of emancipation.1 Koolhaas can be interpreted as resuscitating the early modernist imperative to develop an architecture of social relevance through a mix of programmatic and formal change. He seeks to challenge practices of social reproduction as they are embedded in architectural ideologies and spatial programmes. Programmatic innovations include the production of fields of social encounter, new functional juxtapositions, and forms of spatial segmentation designed to resist social reproduction and enable certain ‘freedoms’ (Zaera and Koolhaas, 1992). In this chapter I want to examine such claims as they play out in the design and use of the Seattle Central Library. The primary method of analysis for this critique is an adaptation of space syntax analysis filtered through a framework of assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) and Bourdieu’s (1977) concept of habitus.
