Metaphors and Moves in Innovative Public Places:
Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center with comments inspired by Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Public
Library
By Carol Heffern
December 1, 2004
Case Studies in 20th Century Architecture
Prof. H. Woofter
A metaphor- in words it describes one thing as being like something else. For example, a
fresh snow covered the land like a blanketed. In architecture, it is a name that may become a
physical movement to define a space and help it be understood on a more intuitive level.
Heffern, 2
Contemplate the city for a moment. It is a place where people come together, where they find
themselves in a complex system of public spaces, interactive areas, private places, transportation
paths, and information links. Visually, the eye of the city is confronted by a rich conglomeration of
information. The city often seems very chaotic, like everything is encompassed within it. Yet
after a fresh snow, with all the buildings, roads, nooks, and crannies covered in white, it is as if
the entire city is united in an understanding of the snow. The new Lois and Richard Rosenthal
Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio finds its strength in a metaphor like that of the
snow blanket, a single bold movement in which the floor curves skywards into the back wall of the
building. This was dubbed by the British architect and master designer of the complex, Zaha
Hadid, the Urban Carpet. This idea physically unites the varying gallery spaces, the circulation,
and many other aspects of the art museum. Hadid often uses a metaphor, a single sculptural
element that unites her complex and layered designs, which she represents with powerful graphic
renderings, paintings, and computer-generated images which help describe her unifying
metaphors.1 Rem Koolhaas is one such other designer of metaphors. Hadid joins other
contemporary architects in stepping out of the traditional architectural realm of public spaces for
arts and humanities by concentrating on a complex design that is unified in an understandable,
often metaphorical manner. In one or two unifying metaphorical elements that focus on an
interactive journey of sight and of circulation within a building, Hadid, like Koolhaas, end with a
result that redefinines the energy and experience in a public space.
In May of 2003 the Lois and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art (the CAC)
held its grand opening in Cincinnati, Ohio. It was the first built work in the United States for the
Baghdad- born, London architect Zaha Hadid. It was also the first museum in the country to be
designed solely by a woman. The precast concrete, glass-windowed, black-anodized aluminum
building took only two years to complete. It retains the horizontality that is present in many of
Hadid’s other projects, which is quite a feat for a six story building on a 11,000 square corner lot
in downtown. The museum was commissioned by the CAC, the Contemporary Art Center, which
has championed the display of progressive art since their founding in 1939. Funded by the
trustees of the CAC, especially Mr. and Mrs. Rosenthal, the $20.9 million dollar project required
an inclusive atmosphere to cater to a wide audience. It was also vital that the museum be
designed to house a non-permanent collection of art, which strongly influenced Hadid’s versatile
design. With a reputation for introducing new ideas and diverse media to appeal to a varied
audience, they were one of the first institutions in the United States dedicated to exhibiting
contemporary art.2
Younger sibling to the month by only a year, the new Central Library in Seattle,
Washington offers an opportunity to explore similar spatial and circulatory approaches of the CAC
Ian Borden, “A Conversation with Zaha Hadid- A Tale of Three Cities: New York, Brasilia, Moscow,”
Architectural Design 71, no. 5 (Sept. 2001): 58.
2
Mark Irving, “Centre of Attention,” Blueprint (Aug. 2003): 46.
1
Heffern, 3
in Cincinnati. Designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, with partner Joshua Ramus from
Koolhaas’ firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), the library also sits on a downtown
site and is a diamond-shaped grid of glass and steel.3 Its 15 stories can house up to 1.4 million
volumes, although it is currently holding less than three quarters of that. It has nine public levels,
with reading rooms, book stacks, a children’s library, parking, free wireless internet access, and
400 public computers, in all of which allow Starbuck-loving Seattleites to bring drinks. The project
cost 165.5 million dollars and is 362,987 square feet. 4 The facility was approved by Seattle
voters in 1998, and is part of a larger library improvement plan the city plans to implement until
2007.5
It is often easiest to locate an essential idea of a design if it has a specific name, and this
is true in Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center in the metaphorical Urban Carpet. The Urban Carpet
is a glazed concrete floor that runs from the street outside, slides into the main lobby, and turns in
one graceful move up the six stories to create the back wall of the complex, like a snow-boarding
half-pipe. This is where the experience of the building happens. This is where the patron is
drawn into the structure from the street outside. From here, the patron can see and interact
visually and physically with other patrons, even though the space created does not hold the art. It
provides ample visual opportunities into the galleries. This is where the vertical circulation
throughout the building zigzags its way upwards. This is where the light falls into the glasscovered atrium down six stories.6 Metaphorically, the building, predominantly the lobby floor and
back wall, is draped like a blanket upon the city in an elegant movement of floor plane becoming
a six story wall. Hadid’s work is complex and layered, influenced by not only preceding
architecture, but also by the society around us, “The idea of context no longer means the physical
space surrounding buildings, and now can mean a variety of things which are as critical as a site
boundary.”7 It is the simple elegance of the Urban Carpet, however, that unifies and often solves
the complexities of the rest of the building.
The Seattle Central Library uses a few more metaphors than the Contemporary Art
Museum, but in a similar way, Koolhaas and Ramus’ design is about unifying the complexities of
life, of a building’s programmatic needs, its circulation, and its vision. The Seattle Central
Library’s areas are named in a similar metaphorical manner. There is the “Living Room”, which
invokes images of a cozy intimate family room, and the “Mixing Chamber” which makes one
imagine a witch’s laboratory.8 The “Living Room” on the third floor is like Hadid’s “Urban Carpet”
“booked,” Architecture 93, is. 7 (July 2004): 39. EBSCO Host MasterFILE Elite.
Leonard Kniffel, “Seattle Opening Draws Huge Crowds,” American Libraries 35, is. 7 (Aug. 2004): 12.
EBSCO Host MasterFILE Elite.
5
Kniffel, 13.
6
Mark Irving, “Centre of Attention,” Blueprint (Aug. 2003): 49.
7
Borden, 59.
8
Lawrence W. Cheek and Julia Mandell, “reading rem,” Architecture 93, is. 7 (July 2004): 41. EBSCO
Host MasterFILE Elite.
3
4
Heffern, 4
area, a monumental atrium that is nevertheless comfortably scaled and a central location for the
visual interaction of the visitors. The building itself was described as looking “like a pile of books
wrapped in taut netting,” because of its diamond-patterned I-beam exoskeleton and curtained
glass walls. 9 Nevertheless, the thought design process behind the library was described by the
City Librarian Deborah Jacobs, “to house the book in a great way” and to find “the right housing
and space for the book, and honoring it and protecting it so that it always can grow without taking
away from anything else.”10
The Urban Carpet of Hadid’s art center, although a single sculptural movement, controls
and unifies many other elements of the museum, especially the circulation. Hadid designed the
circulation in the CAC as a continuous path up the multiple stories of the compact urban space.
But it is unique because the path was removed from the galleries. The circulation does not
interfere with the galleries and viewing space. Rather it enhances it.11 The glass covered six
story atrium created by the urban carpet is the area of main circulation. This is where Hadid sets
her stairs, detached from the viewing spaces, yet maintaining a visible connection with them. The
stairs are shallow risers four and a half inches high and sixteen inches deep and are made of
clear anodized aluminum treads. They zigzag in a set of switchbacks up two stories to a large
gallery landing, which then flows through a compact gallery, and loops back to the stairs until the
visitor ends six flights up at the UnMuseum, the children’s museum.12 It is the gentle inclined
journey on the stairs that entice visitors to move upwards. The stairs form narrow channels, so
that “each passing is a possible encounter”.13 The space created by the Urban Carpet is
interactive, manipulated to introduce visitors to each other through their visual proximity, like a
social promenade.14
Hadid’s unique circulation in the CAC encourages the patron’s participation and
experience of the space, and Koolhaas’ circulation for the Seattle library, likewise, shares in an
expressive journey involving the establishment’s activities. The architects sought to reconceive
the way books are accessed and how public space is designed.15 The feature circulation for the
Central Library is a “Books Spiral”, which is literally a spiraling path through the library’s stacks.16
At a three percent grade, it is a squared-off rectangle of gently ramped spaces in the midsection
of the building, along which runs a continuous series of bookshelves. It takes up the equivalent of
four floors, levels six through nine. It has been described by journalists Lawrence Cheek and
9
Cheek and Mandell, 42.
Kniffel, 12.
11
Irving, 49.
12
Suzanne Stephens, “Zaha Hadid revs up a tight site in Cincinnati with the Rosenthal Center for
Contemporary Art and draws a crowd,” Architectural Record (Aug. 2003): 87.
13
Joseph Giovannini, “Hadid in America: A Lightness of Being,” Art in America (Nov. 2003): 59-60.
14
Irving, 49.
15
“booked”
16
Kniffel, 12.
10
Heffern, 5
Julia Mandell as, “an ingenious solution to the floor-by-floor division that plagues browsers in
conventional libraries.”17
The Urban Carpet in Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center plays a vital role in the strong
visibility of the museum. Hadid wanted to create a “visual community of people immersed in the
same place and experience.”18 Unlike the traditional twentieth century idea of museum rooms as
white boxes where each work is in a distinct space and where museum-goers are detached and
never make eye contact, the CAC is immersive and experiential. Viewers interact with the art and
with each other simultaneously.19 The stairs and the open space of the Urban Carpet enclosed
atrium play a vital role in this. The atrium’s openness and transparency frames views of the sky,
the city without, the rest of the stairs, the lobby underneath, and the open galleries overlooking
the atrium.
Transparency must be a fad in the twenty first century approach to public fine arts
buildings, for Koolhaas’ library also creates a visual community. Crystalline glass and steel, the
article “Booked” states, “Nothing is hidden here. Transparency reigns.”20 The books are visible
on a grand scale. And the reading room on the tenth floor is like a glass tree house in the sky. A
complex geometry is formed by platforms that make up the other spaces in the building jut out
and overlap each other, generating captivating views of the city outside, the sky, and the street
from almost everywhere inside the library.21
The Urban Carpet in the CAC links visually and physically the complex variety of
function-specific spaces in the rest of the art museum. With offices on the exterior of the
enclosure, making use of the glassed walls, the galleries take up the middle of the building.
These spaces are rather complex geometries and volumetric sequences. Hadid varied the
gallery spaces immensely, with some small, compact, windowless rooms, and others with high
ceilings, balconies, and openings towards the stairs and atrium to allow viewing contact. 22 She
argues an untraditional approach to gallery spaces, for strong visual dynamics, a catalogue of
galleries. She wanted to provide a variety of dedicated spaces to accommodate different kinds
and sizes of work, rather than the traditional neutral, loft-like galleries which allow a variety of
configurations of overall space.23
Koolhaas, in a similar manner, organized the Central Library with very specific spaces for
functions, rather than spaces that allowed a variety of configurations. Organized in a stack of
programmatic clusters, each arrangement is dedicated to a specific function. Public interaction
and meetings, reference, reading, main book storage, administration, and children’s area each
17
Cheek and Mandell, 41.
Giovannini, “Hadid in America,” 60.
19
Giovannini, “Hadid in America,” 59.
20
“booked”
21
Cheek and Mandell, 42.
22
Stephens, 90.
23
Giovannini, “Hadid in America,” 60.
18
Heffern, 6
have a unique platform of their own. The design is such that it is “unlikely that each function will
spill out into another area.”24 The third level houses the monumental atrium of the “Living Room”.
The fourth level holds public meeting rooms and the technology training center, which are
connected by cool labyrinth-like spaces decorated in a glossy red. The “Mixing Chamber” on the
fifth level holds a reference desk and is an area where librarians roam freely to work one-on-one
with the patrons. The flashy glass tree house atrium on the tenth level offers a visual connection
with the energetic urban environment as it protrudes into the sky with an awesome view.25
But for their similar design outcomes of a metaphorical unification of the circulation and
visual cohesiveness, the Contemporary Art Center and the Seattle Central Library vary in their
success in their urban environment. The buildings themselves vary in their success if
approached from an interior or exterior standpoint.
Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center is, by most accounts encountered, surprisingly
successful in its home on the corner of Walnut Street and East 6 th Street in downtown Cincinnati.
Although set on a very small site, only 11,000 square feet, amidst high-rise buildings, the design,
like many of Hadid’s other works, has a very horizontal feel to it on the outside. Horizontal
prisms, concrete blocks project through the virtual walls of the space and cantilever out over
Walnut Street. The outside, however, is not preparatory for the interior experience, which turns
very vertical with the sweeping Urban Carpet wall that extends up the six storied structure turning
the horizontality vertical.26 Hadid quoted, “The site is very compact. At the same time, it’s an
area where the city has created a monumental space for culture. So the idea of the ground, the
lobby, becomes very important. The ground has to be vibrant and very active, always.”27 This is
where the idea of the Urban Carpet begins to take shape in a space larger than just the building
and relate the building to the rest of the city surrounding it. With a single movement of concrete it
draws people from the sidewalk outside, under the door into the lobby, and up through the first
and second floors onwards up past the sixth story and to the roof of the museum. It is the final,
cohesive layer of a very multi-layered project, slightly chaotic like the city. Hadid describes the
influence of complexity upon her work, “The complexity of cities and their approximate eventspaces does feed in to the quality and layout of the work. My early canvases, for example, are so
jammed with information, with geometry, with an understanding of site alongside the equal
importance of invention. There are so many options, and cities- all cities- give projects many
other layers.”28
Inside of the new CAC the boundaries between internal and external are blurred, such
that the visitor still has very strong visual connections with the urban environment around them.
24
Cheek and Mandell, 43.
Cheek and Mandell, 44.
26
Stephens, 87.
27
Irving, 48.
28
Borden, 60.
25
Heffern, 7
The public foyer immediately inside the door celebrates the city outside its galleries. 29 The sliding
of the concrete Urban Carpet under the buildings exterior wall allows the building to occupy the
city’s pedestrian space, and the base of the building is meant to suggest a public plaza extending
to the street and inviting the city into the museum. The lobby visually extends the sidewalk inside
through its glass walls. It is all a fluid continuum of existing public paths and places in
simultaneous horizontal and vertical movement. In a very brave move, Hadid utilized prime
enclosed space as an indoor plaza to tempt visitors to the upper floors. Furthermore, as one
moves through the structure, they are encountered continuously with framed views of the outside.
Light strips on the stairs continue the effect of the street extending into the building. Hadid
described this pull of the pedestrian into the building’s core, “Balancing the bulk of the building on
an elegant, glass walled lobby, the ground floor is conceived as a continuation of the pavement
outside, itself stained a dark gray and patterned with inset, thin light boxes that pull the eye to the
building.”30
Koolhaas’ Library, on the other hand, is seems less successful in its urban environment
than the CAC. This is especially true from the outside, according to several articles. It is
described in the Lawrence and Mandell article as “bombastically mannered, so intellectually highstrung, so evidently aloof from the rabble around it.”31 The article “booked” describes it as “a
squat, crystalline alien on the landscape.” 32 Located in downtown Seattle on a steeply sloped
site, it was a challenging location. And its oddly shaped fifteen stories of diamond-paned glass
have been described as “stunning, but not pretty.”33
Inside, however, seems to be a different story for the Seattle Central Library, and its
success seems to be reclaimed. While it looks arbitrary from the outside, the building’s internal
form is expressed. Many people see this as beautiful, because they like to see the internal order
of things.34 From the inside, looking out through the windows, the library does share a connection
and a place in its urban environment. The article “booked” narrates, “Look up through the angled
walls of the monumentally scaled “Living Room,” or down through the massive flat plane that
hangs over a deep sidewalk, and suddenly it’s the city that becomes the building envelope—
three-dimensional wallpaper for the reading public. Like the city it serves, the new library is a big,
loud generator of urban life.”35
Hadid and Koolhaas are some of a growing number of foreign architects bringing their
path breaking designs and skills to public arts buildings in the United States. In her
Contemporary Art Center, Zaha Hadid challenges the traditional concept of a museum as a white
Giovannini, “Hadid in America,” 59.
Irving, 48.
31
Cheskis anad Mandell, 45.
32
“booked”
33
Cheskis anad Mandell, 46.
34
Cheskis anad Mandell, 46.
35
“booked”
29
30
Heffern, 8
box that can accommodate any type of work against a neutral background. Her unconventional
use of varied galleries for the solely non-temporary contemporary art exhibits and the
architecturally intriguing design of visually linked, yet physically removed stairway circulation
challenge the idea of a museum as solely a place to look at art. It makes the visitor experience
not only the art, but also the architecture. Some find this tension between the architecture and
the art enhances the experience of art. Others do not. But with the Urban Carpet, she is able to
drag the street into the building, reflecting the CAC’s genuine and documented efforts to reach as
broad of an audience as possible.
Koolhaas, likewise, presents the public with very innovative public spaces. He described
the challenge of his project was “to create a flexibility for an unknown future without building a
dumb box.”36 Like Hadid’s museum, his goal laws to encourage a community feel and attract a
wider and more varied audience. No longer is the library a place of quiet and private inquiry, but
“this one is about community- and is poised to explode with information.”37 Feeling that a bound
book should still be a legitimate form of communication in this age of computers, his building
seeks to integrate the traditional library with a future library, one that may change dramatically as
computers replace books, magazines, and card catalogues.38 The library, in fact has 400 public
computers.39 This new approach to a public library has been reinvented on three fronts: form,
function, and spirit. It is abuzz with energy.40
The public library and the art museum in the twenty first century are two places with
specific programmatic functions, and architectural histories that have catered to those quite well.
Both have been, and still remain, places where the public at large can go to experience, to view,
to read, to contemplate, to learn. Traditionally they have both been fairly quiet spaces, for self
introspection, emotional movement, and the obtainment of knowledge. But architectural design is
beginning redefine these spaces, to keep their most important characteristics while enhancing
them in daring ways to respond an audience of today. Interaction, visual and physical is a large
part of this. Circulation is a large part of this, for in the United States of the twenty first century
too see is to understand. And the placing in the urban environment plays a vital role, how the
public responds to it from the outside, and how they respond from the inside. Koolhaas’ Seattle
Central Library responds to each of these elements, some parts are more successful than others.
But he, like Hadid unifies the building with metaphors like the Book Spiral and Living Room,
physical elements named to create awareness and an understanding about what is going on in
that space. Hadid goes further, by drawing the public off of the street into the foyer and into the
36
Cheskis and Mandell, 47.
Cheskis and Mandell, 47.
38
“booked”
39
Cheskis and Mandell, 41.
40
Cheskis and Mandell, 40.
37
Heffern, 9
atrium and up, up, up to and past the galleries. The complexities of the galleries, like those of the
city, are united and comprehended in a graceful metaphor, an Urban Carpet, blanketing the city.
My first graphic representation describes the metaphor of the Urban Carpet as a method
to simplify and clarify circulation and vision in the complexities of the building and the city in
Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center. Like Hadid, who uses many powerful graphic images, I at first
chose to do a graphic representation on mylar of the Urban Carpet with a collage of images of the
building. The randomness of the collage and the images I chose show the complexity of the
galleries, to mimic the intricacy of the city. There are images from her original design sketches, to
models, to computer graphics, to paintings, to all the built parts of the building inside, and to the
structure’s exterior in relation to Cincinnati. My hope was to portray the complexities of the city
and the building united into one flattened perspectival volume, as made cohesive by one idea,
one metaphor, the Urban Carpet. I cut out the stairs to show how the circulation in the atrium
bordered by the Urban Carpet led a clear path through all the complex spaces.
My second graphic representation for Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center plays off my first
graphic image. As this paper describes, the idea of a metaphor has been used by numerous
architects now to simplify and explain a building. The public centers for art and for literature in
the twenty first century have been in a process of redefinition, energizing areas that have
previously been needlessly dulled, while functionally keeping congruent with their pasts. The
metaphor is a way of taking a complex and layered design that reflects the intricacy of the
building’s function, simplifying it and making it understandable through vision and through
circulation. The article “booked” talks about the effect of a metaphor-bounded space in the
Seattle Central Library’s, “Look up through the angled walls of the monumentally scaled “Living
Room,” or down through the massive flat plane that hangs over a deep sidewalk, and suddenly
it’s the city that becomes the building envelope—three-dimensional wallpaper for the reading
public.”41 I found this quote very apt for my second graphic representation of Hadid’s CAC.
The Urban Carpet served as a sort of wall-papered frame for views of the city. Although
it is concrete and opaque, the Urban Carpet rests upon other buildings and the city, like wallpaper
lays upon a wall in one extensive, smooth movement. Already feeling my representation would
be a bit more powerful three-dimensionally, I went with the idea of a futuristic plexy-glass model
like Hadid makes of her projects. The model that I made is also plexy-glass, and shows more
depth than a two-dimensional collage. My aim is for it is to physically demonstrate the draping of
the metaphorical wall over the city to simplify it and explain its complexities. These complexities
are shown, once again as a collage of the building’s images in the design stages, and in its
implementation internally and externally. Only this time the collage acts more as a wall-paper to
envelope the building. The box around the curved wall-papered metaphor is to control and
41
“booked”
Heffern, 10
simplify the view, which is an important part of an art gallery. I hope to one day visit both the
CAC and the Seattle Central Library to offer more of my own insight into these apparently
intriguing experiential spaces.
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