Once more, with feeling

[k8tey]

For those who have seen it, please respond!

1. What do you think of the carpets in the Seattle Public Library? Specifically the ones with the huge botanical prints?

2. Has anyone seen the auditorium curtain? Touched it? Thoughts?

Sorry if I blathered on in my last post, but I want you to share your reactions!

Please?

Comments

[trixiefirecat]

i haven't seen that carpet, but i have lots of photos of the carpets in both the new orleans and las vegas convention centers after having done a couple conventions in each place. for both their hideous ugliness, horrid choice of color and utterly bewildering -- bordering on psychotropic -- patterns and shapes. after walking over them for days on end, feeling frustrated and upset at having a really terrible job and wanting to get OUT!

[k8tey]

That's called "hospitality" carpet. It's specifically designed that way to not show stains and wear patterns. I think some designers are convinced it seems luxurious in a baroque kind of way. I know, ugh. I think that particular contract hospitality style is slowly going to go by the wayside as customers become more and more design savvy, and hotels are just going to have to eat the cost of replacing their carpets more often.

The carpet I helped design for the Toronto airport was a very subtle monolithic that contained multiple shades of close-valued greys, which actually achieves the same stain-hiding/wear resistance as the obnoxious colored/patterned stuff. There are designers working on improving these things!

Did you see the pics of the carpets I'm talking about in the last post I made? (the one in the comments section is a good aerial view)

[bizetsy]

Hi there. The SPL is across the street from my busstop, so I am there often. I can take some pictures for you if you want.

I haven't noticed the carpets, much.

The curtain is, if I recall correctly, smooth and cream on one side--it looks like vinyl--and shaggy green/blue/white fibers on the other side. It looks like a humongous terrycloth towel, if that helps, but the long threads lay pretty flat. It's almost always roped off so I haven't been able to touch it.

[k8tey]

Oh, Biz, Happy Birthday!!!

If you want to take pics, that's cool, but there are lots of them in the design magazines right now. What I was curious about was what I can't see in a picture, which is how they intgrate with the environment.

It may be that I am not getting much response because they are so well integrated with the design that they do not stand out as a separate element! And that's the kind of thing you can't tell from a picture, you know?

So actually, you telling me you haven't noticed the carpets is exactly what I was looking for! Thank you!

Also, the fuzzy side of the curtain looks brown in the pics and the smooth side looks green/blue/white, so that's good to know they are both colorful. Did you know that one side reflects, and the other absorbs sound? So cool!

Thank you so much for sharing! :)

[upstanding_lady]

I know this is exactly not what you're looking for, but this sums up my entire feelings of the place:

It looks like a fucking dance club.

[k8tey]

*cocks head to side, squints eyes and nods*

you asked...

[vorona]

I love the huge botanical print carpets. They're great.

And I still love the screaming chartreuse escalators.

But I am deeply disgusted with some other, less noticeable aspects of the place.

Hey, I still wouldn't kick Rem Koolhaas out of bed or anything silly like that.

And it's not his fault. I refuse to believe it's his fault. It just can't be. But someone really blew it in a few areas. The work spaces around The Infernal Machine are naaaassssty industrial-in-a-bad-way. It's an unpleasant, grinding, stressful, and ugly space. No thought seems to have been given to the human beings who work there for hours. The "SHO" room (get it, like an auto plant, ha ha... ha...) is bleak and cold, a horridly "functional" place - again, no consideration of how depressing it must be to spend hours in this ugly, windowless room.

They seem to have cranked the air a bit, but, stupidly, the 1st floor circ desk was built without air vents precisely where people are working hardest and need them most, making it prone to dead, stale air.

Re: you asked...

[k8tey]

A friend and professor of mine, one of the most sensitive and expressive artists/designers I know, was very distressed by the noise level

but could the padrones milk their own cows?

[vorona]

No, I don't wear a vocera, because I'm neither a shelver nor a librarian. Many of those wearing the voceras have said that they feel like they're being "run around all day like robots." For the librarians, this creepily combines with losing their traditional materials selection duties to outsourcing. As the clerks work faster, harder, and much more impersonally with the public. It's dystopian and it's polarized - the working conditions echo the assembly-line and "out in the fields" design themes. It's quite regressive, and people are unhappy. The stress is literally making people sick, breaking them. The wonderful chartreuse elevators and the muttering bald heads in the escalator wall (oh yeah!) and even the lipstick/artery meeting floor can't make up for this.

Re: but could the padrones milk their own cows?

[k8tey]

Many of those wearing the voceras have said that they feel like they're being "run around all day like robots."

When I first read about the vocera, this was exacly my fear.

The stress is literally making people sick, breaking them.

This is horrible. This is the hallmark of the worst type of design. Sick Building Syndrome. No pretty carpet or graphic wayfinding can ever make up for this.

[mouselette]

Hi Katey

[k8tey]

thank you cutie! I was asking people who have been to the library, but I am glad to hear your thoughts on it, as well as your overall thoughts...

the library at my school is designed aesthetically in a way that appears very beautiful, but the chairs are uncomfortable and the vent system roars in an annoying way.

back when i did my undergrad, i would spend hours at the microfiche machines in the basement of the library of mt. holyoke. Just me, alone in the dark of that great big castle-like library with all the images of century-old newspapers whizzing by on film...

Prints like the carpets in the pictures would be fun to screenprint, wouldn't they?

Have you ever thought about screenprinting fabric yardage or wallpapers?