The Seattle Times has an interesting interview with Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect who designed the much-lauded Seattle Central Library. He mentions his thoughts on the “book spiral”, saying:
… one of the points of a library was that there are accidents and that you find yourself in areas where you didn’t expect to be and where you kind of look at books that are not necessarily the books that you’re aiming for. So it was to create a kind of almost arbitrariness — or to create a kind of walking experience, an almost kind of urban walk … a kind of Rotterdam, a very efficient, direct aiming for limited destinations.