In Rem Readings the NY Times talks about Seattle’s distrust of the new Rem Koolhaas design for the Seattle Public Library.

Much of the library backlash can be attributed to the fear of being conned by big-city hucksters. This isn’t just xenophobia. People in Seattle have reason to feel crabby about buildings designed by famous architects. Twelve years ago, we got Robert Venturi’s dull — yet impossible to navigate — Seattle Art Museum, dominated by a gigantic staircase to nowhere. Its massive facade inspired a general yawn. In 2000, Frank Gehry gave us the garishly colored, extravagantly crumpled and disarmingly silly Experience Music Project.

There is a feeling that big city architecture doesn’t belong here, especially since we’re not offered the signature buildings, but the stylized, paycheck-generating derivatives. The Space Needle is uniquely Seattle, but the EMP is not quite as impressive as Gehry’s museum in Bilboa—always compared to the architect’s more popular previous work.

Rem’s library seems different and I hope that it is. He certainly breaks new ground in his manifestos about architecture. I have followed his books and other writing about place, process, globalization and media with much greater interest. The NY Prada sotre was his answer to the realization that most public space was retail space—why weren’t high-profile projects going on there? But few of these manifestos have been turned into architecture, and fewer still have been seen as successes.

Rem has achieved pop-architecture status without creating memorable buildings. So with the Seattle Public Library, there is a chance that both the architect and the city can achieve architectural significance come next year when the library opens.