On my way back to studio, I went to the Bibliothèque nationale, which was designed by Dominique Perrault in the late eighties/early nineties as one of Mitterand's many public projects and finished in 1996. It gets a lot of complaints about book preservation (storing books in glass towers isn't really the best idea it turns out), use (despite the towers, it is really a single large horizontal mat building, so getting from one side to the other as an employee or a visitor is tedious and time-consuming) and cost (it's free and open to the public to walk around the central corridor loop, but access to the libraries and exhibitions requires admission). And from my perspective, before visiting the project I thought there was something nice about using a public piece of architecture to frame a collective public space (the four towers are four corners of a large rectangular plaza) rather than consuming that space--a figure/ground reversal basically. But because the central plaza has a huge void in the middle for an inaccessible three-storey sunken forest, this potential for a strong, open democratic space (i'm imagining pioneer courthouse square--Portland's urban "living room" on a far larger scale) is effectively subverted. And any interest in inhabiting the public periphery of the void is dashed by the number of steps one has to climb to get to it. So, what could've been a really charged urban space is just an enormous, desolate teak landscape. It would actually be interesting to compare I.M. Pei's addition to the Louvre (also a Mitterand commission) to this building, because typologically they seem have similar ambitions--submerge the program below ground to preserve an urban space above, framed by surrounding buildings--but in my opinion the Louvre is far more successful.
But, despite all of its flaws (or maybe just because I visited the site at such a poetic time of day?) it's a really stunning piece of architecture. It is actually kind of breathtaking to see such a large site completely vacant in a city this dense. There is a real sense of grandeur to it--from the four towers extending into the sky in perspective to the monumental stepped plinth they sit on and the long sloping ramp down to the entrance--that has clearly been carefully orchestrated. You might even argue, overly orchestrated (why do you need to climb thirty steps just to take a ramp down two storeys?) but it's still successful. Or maybe I'm just a sucker for grandeur. The only view walking around the building looks into the central planted courtyard--the diagram of the building is a kind of reification of introspection. So you're looking through branches to one side with reading rooms to the other, always looking in. There's also something timeless about the materials and the massing of the building--it's not trendy, it's not about form, it (makes itself looks like it) is only concerned with proper planning and urban strategies. And given the current trend of architecture towards form as the mediator of meaning, I find that comforting.
Flickr set is here, and this is a view of the project from the Simone de Beauvoir footbridge as I was leaving:
No comments:
Post a Comment