“The Making of a Library” provided Metropolis with the opportunity to create a new way of covering architecture. The new Seattle library had already received plenty of press before we had the opportunity to cover it, so we couldn’t treat our article as a traditional “news” story. Much of the coverage centered on the building’s lead architect, Rem Koolhaas. We decided to take on the myth of sole authorship by telling a more extensive story about the collaborative nature of large building projects, bringing in all of the major players from LMN, the local architects, to the engineers, graphic designers, lighting designers, furniture designers, librarians, and even façade testers.

After art director Nancy Nowacek visited the space, we gathered all of the visual material and divided it into four groups: research, façade, the book spiral and interiors. We decided that the layout would reflect one of the main features of the building: the continuous book spiral that allows the library to easily expand and contract parts of the collection as new fields of study emerge. The 18-page story is designed as a single piece, in which the physical pages of the magazine do not necessarily define the start or end of a section. This synthesis also allowed us to integrate five sidebars and a series of 13 responses from library users and employees to better help define how the building works.

Our coverage was very well received. When the American Institute of Architects rejected LMN’s award entry on the grounds that an American firm had not designed the library, the LMN/OMA team used our story to show that it was a collaborative project. The building not only was accepted as a submission, but it also won a prestigious AIA award.