The Clothing of Life

Drive from mountain forest to city park.

From North Cascades vine maple

to Seattle conservatory cacti.

Life's change of clothes.

January's lost jobs: Like laying off Portland

The numbers associated with this recession are tough to grasp.

The latest is 598,000.

That’s the number of folks who lost their jobs in January.

It might help — if that’s the right verb — to know that the population of Portland is 576,000.

In other words, this economy threw the equivalent of the entire Rose City out of work in one month.

And what’s happening this month?

Is Seattle being laid off even as you read this?

Another “Deep Recession” note: We are hearing the term “deep recession” more and more. It’s transitional nomenclature that elides into where this is clearly headed — deep-ression.

Don't judge this building by its cover

The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas’ exterior cover for the Seattle Public Library doesn’t exactly make the 10-story, disjointed collection of trapezoids, parallelograms and triangles a building you’d like to enter — or an architectural book you'd like to read.

But once inside, you realize that you can’t tell a library from its cover.

Not nearly.

The place astounds.


All those dissonant exterior angles create an interior mesh for a wildly rhythmic yet oddly harmonious architectural symphony: the grid of patterned diamond windows (nearly 10,000 of them), the slanting beams and ceilings, the vivid colors (cherry red hallways, cautionary yellow escalators), the spiraling stacks of books. The airy openness of the place. You could spend a day here gawking — and never crack a book.

The folks behind this remarkable building took a $165 million gamble and came up with a monumental, visionary landmark. They, as much as Koolhaas, are to be commended for their bravery and foresight.

The next time you visit Seattle, forget the Seahawks, the Mariners and Pike Place Market .

Go directly to the library, and plan to stay.