The Dumbest Thing I’ve Read All Day: 09/07

You go to the library to learn, but you shouldn’t be wasting your time learning how to not get lost.

Too many people getting lost in new downtown library

For all the architectural artistry of Rem Koolhaas’ downtown Seattle library, there was just one little problem with the building: People kept getting lost inside.

Visitors would walk down the gently spiraling rows of books, following the Dewey Decimal System, and just past the section ranging from 0 (cassettes) to 0.196 (paranormal), they’d dead-end at a window.

“There was nothing telling them how to get out,” Lynne Faulk said the other day, standing just inside the Fourth Avenue entrance to the gleaming, glass-sheathed building, which opened to critical raves in 2004.

Faulk is a professional “wayfinder” — which is a fancy way of saying she makes signs. The Seattle Public Library hired her this year to help book borrowers and tourists — especially tourists — navigate the $170 million library, which may have included fluorescent, chartreuse escalators, but not many signs.

I’ve heard of getting lost in a book, but never in a library.

When my comany was helping with the final cleanup phase, I got to enjoy one of the few perks in the business: getting to tour the building at our leisure before the actual occupant.

I could tell from the beginning that this was going to be a fiasco, but I didn’t think they’d be getting people lost. Though when you build something to house books that overshadows the literature itself, it can never go well. The place looked like some oversized and overly hip restaurant or gallery rather than a library.

The city is going to pay this “Wayfinder” almost $50K for her artsy signs. I draw, proofread and interpret maps of entire states for a living, where did I miss signing up for this gig?