ABSTRACT
The Seattle Central Public Library has garnered awards for its design, including Time Magazine’s Outstanding Building (Lacayo, 2004) and the American Institute of Architects’ Honor Award for Architecture in 2005. There is little question that most people find it impressive in terms of its technical and aesthetic aspects. However, another aspect of design is function, and the Seattle Central Library has received more criticism than credit for its navigability (Carlson et al., 2010), suggesting that the Seattle Central Library may be an informative case for understanding why people get lost in buildings. In this chapter, we will use an existing framework for human navigational variability to try to explore what can be learned by examining this unique case in a naturalistic experiment on human navigational performance.
