If you haven't seen pictures of Seattle's new central library, now is as good a time as any. What's with that town and incredibly weird architecture? The EMP's building, built to look like a smashed guitar, resembles a sci-fi octopus turned inside out. The library looks like either the inside of a Wired magazine or the telepathic fever dreams of Thom Yorke, Wayne Coyne and Stanley Kubrick's ghost. Here's a few links to the best of the bunch. Prepare to have your mind blown.

Exterior

Plastic neon reception room

Mechanical checkout conveyor belt (what *is* that thing?)

Yellow neon elevator

Crazy wooden letter floor

Wow, the future is now!

I consider the gauntlet thrown down. If Portland needs yet another reason to can the baseball idea, it's this. PDX's central library is what, 100 years old? That's positively ancient in building years! It's high time we implode the sucker and replace it with something even more elaborate than SEA-TAC's space-aged biblioteca. Might I suggest hologram card catalogs, android librarians and virtual-reality water slides?