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Dewey Decimal spiral: the view from 780 to 610

The Seattle Public Library has a "books spiral." At the core of the building, a very gradual ramp goes around and around an escalator. Bookshelves and reading areas radiate off of the spiral. The floors of the building are designed to correspond to the Dewey Decimal system, so that as you traverse the fifth level you're passing the 500s, and the 600s are on the sixth level, and so on. Movable rubber squares tile the ramp, labeling the adjacent call numbers.

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I love that spiral so much.

man, i love that place.
i was just telling my family they had to go see it when they're in seattle in a few weeks. any other ideas for them?

I dunno, aside from a puzzle convention that ended yesterday, the library was really the highlight for me.

Last time we were there, we went on an "underground tour" and that was fun. I've heard good things about the glass museum in Tacoma but we didn't actually make it there. There's always hanging around in Freemont and seeing the troll under the bridge...

I'm fond of the troll bridge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fremont_Troll

The library sounds cool.

I'd also recommend the Troll Bridge and the Seattle Underground tour (http://www.undergroundtour.com/).

Archie McPhee (http://www.archiemcphee.com) is a fun store (or at least it was when I visited it years ago).

If they're into used book stores, there's also Tales Twice Sold (http://www.twicesoldtales.info/) near the University (if they have allergies, beware, the store has cats).

Movable rubber squares tile the ramp

And *that* was the real ingenuity of the design. One of the most challenging aspects of the two most-used classification systems is that they were designed for fairly static scopes of categories (e.g., they had to find a place to put computer books because there just wasn't a category for that). And, in the same way, the physical locations for these fixed categories were designed as fixed chunks of straight shelving.

To have a spiral where shifting to accomodate new categories of nonfiction as they appear is straightforward, is a brilliant bit of future-thinking in design.

I was last out in Seattle as they were finishing this library, and I haven't been in it yet. Need to fix that.

My first reaction to this post was "aw crap, I saw that library from the outside but never went in. Guess I missed out."

Then I went "WAITAMINNIT."

Cannot wait to be living here!

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