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When Rem Koolhaas and OMA completed the Seattle Public Library in 2004, the building's most radical proposition was structural as much as formal: rather than hiding its skeleton, the entire exterior is wrapped in a steel-and-glass diagrid — a lattice of diamond-shaped cells that serves simultaneously as structure, skin, and ornament, collapsing the usual hierarchy between those three things. Here the camera finds the building's upper corner, where an angled overhang meets a vertical face, both surfaces sheathed in the same white-framed diamond grid but catching the flat Seattle light at slightly different planes. The composition is almost entirely bisected diagonally by the overhang's edge, the upper triangular mass pressing into a pale, near-white sky with a weight that reads as more solid than glass has any right to. Koolhaas once described the library as a building that refused to be polite; this corner makes that refusal look very deliberate.
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