Books are over,” Rem Koolhaas asserted slyly at the opening of the Bibliothèque Alexis de Tocqueville in Caen, France, on January 13. “That’s what everyone kept saying. Happily, on the contrary, books will probably exist forever.”

As speculation over the future of books mounted with the dawn of the digital age, Koolhaas’s OMA was involved in the design of a dozen libraries—“one of the oldest typologies,” Koolhaas called it, “a pure hybrid of ancient and modern.” Many of the firm’s library designs went unrealized, including its 1989 competition entry for the Bibliothèque National de France, in Paris, where public spaces were represented as voids carved out of a solid block of information. On the other hand, the Seattle Central Library, completed by OMA in 2004, with its intensely researched organizational system and faceted form, is arguably among the best buildings anywhere in the last 20 years.