The feel of space: Social and phenomenal staging in the Seattle Central Library

This chapter is an attempt to study how the individual experience and the cognitive understanding of the Seattle Central Library are shaped by the way users are staged within distinct phenomenal and social settings. It does so by juxtaposing standard analytical descriptions of the structure of access and vision in the building with descriptive accounts of what is noticed by the visitors under different conditions. The differential staging of visitors is shown to be an aspect of the imaginative functioning of the building, not merely an accidentally emergent quality.