This is the most impressive element of Seattle's central library, which opened last year and draws about 8,000 visitors a day, many of them tourists: After study groups and technology forecasts and millions in donations from people who have made their mark in a world of bits and bytes, the books still anchor the building. Some 800,000 of them, shelved in stacks linked by slanted hallways, run in a continuous spiral from the sixth floor to the ninth.
Still, while form has followed function, it is the way this library does it that makes it already a landmark. It was deemed so from the beginning, by locals who mobbed its opening and East Coast critics who found themselves in the home of Microsoft and Starbucks heralding the cutting edge of civic architecture.
''The building conveys a sense of the possibility, even the urgency, of public space in the center of a city," wrote one, Paul Goldberger, in The New Yorker.
''If an American city can erect a civic project as brave as this one," wrote Herbert Muschamp, in The New York Times, ''the sun hasn't set on the west."
Libraries have long served as an architectural anchor for a city and its character, from the Boston Public Library's main branch, with its John Singer Sargent murals, to the towering facade of the New York Public Library's own Fifth Avenue branch.
But at the young end of this century, it is the new home of the Seattle Public Library, designed by a team led by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture, that catalogs our times.
The project was born in 1998 amid the technology boom: Seattle voters approved a $196.4 million bond issue to finance the central library, as well as construction or renovations for 27 branches.
While significant private donations came from old Seattle -- the families of a stern-wheeler captain, a stockbroker, and a broadcasting empire, for example -- most carried the stamp of the Internet age. Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen donated $22.5 million; company chairman Bill Gates gave $20 million. Former Microsoft executives Charles Simonyi and Greg Maffei gave $3 million and $1 million, respectively.
