The dispute that took place at the beginning of the library project is now over and a consensus emerged in the media at the time of the initial opening by François Mitterrand on 30 March 1995. Though the event was given broad coverage, architectural critics have remained silent and very little real criticism was made in the French magazines. This article does not represent a complete assessment of Dominique Perrault?s library. Rather it seeks to go further than a purely descriptive dimension or a simple account of the architect’s intentions or position and address the question of the work’s architectural value.

Knowledge and power

The history of the Bibliothèque Nationale may be traced back to 1368, when Charles V’s personal library of 917 manuscripts was kept in a tower of the Louvre. As it would take too long to follow all its developments since then, we will focus on the unbroken continuity of the collection since Louis XI began expanding it. During this time the library moved to different places and buildings, from Blois to Fontainebleau, before finding a site on rue Richelieu under Louis XIV. The idea of a permanent collection arose directly from the necessity to preserve the dynasty’s continuity. And since its origins, the library had always been directly linked to the central power. Colbert wanted a great library dedicated to the glory of the king, and the revolution in setting up its patrimonial policy would preserve and develop the institution. Through the centuries, the evolution of the need for consultation, preservation and acquisition, the library’s three main functions, would guide the development of its premises. The famous room by Labrouste was built in 1868. During the twentieth century, three new buildings were erected in Versailles, a music department was created on rue de Louvois and many additions were made to the site. Two modern workshops for conservation have been established, one in Sablé and the other in Provins ouside Paris. Yet in spite of this modernization, the library remained unadapted to contemporary needs.
And on 14 July 1988, President François Mitterrand announced to the country, the creation of ‘one of the largest – if not the largest and most modern library in the world’, what was to become Mitterrand’s biggest ‘grand projet’. The new library, at that time dubbed TGB (très grande bibliothèque) by the press in an ironic reference to the TGV (train à grande vitesse), was to be open to everybody and cover all fields of knowledge. New technologies would allow broad access at a distance.1) An architectural competition was then organized for a site by the river just in front of the Bercy Park. And so in August 1989 François Mitterrand confirmed Dominique Perrault’s project which had already been chosen by the jury chaired by I.M. Pei.2) Immediately, there were many adverse reactions to the project that fuelled the controversial debate among scholars about the restructuring of the Bibliothèque Nationale.
This vast project (three times the Centre Pompidou) looked like an autonomous object which could have been designed for Brasilia. The simple composition remained unchanged all through the project’s development: a wide esplanade open to the river with a garden dug in the middle and an L-shaped glass tower at each of the four corners. This radical parti was regarded as an aberration by most library specialists: all books in the the glass towers, all human beings underground in the basement. It seemed incredible that such a scheme could be chosen at all.
Here, as it is in most competitions, the communicational capacities of the architect and the way the project has been presented to the decision-making bodies, were the determinant factors. The Esplanade was said to refer to the ‘Place de la Concorde’, the ‘Champ de Mars’ and the ‘Invalides’. Thus if the brief called for a new library for France, the scheme also provided ‘Paris with a new public square’. Again, the hole in the middle of the esplanade was not simple planted space, but was supposed to directly refer to the ‘Palais Royal’. Architecturally, the building was promoted as being allied to the work of Mies and Kahn (though with no real explanation why) and with the creation of a ‘new minimalism’, in the tracks of the avant-garde. But, most importantly, the rhetoric addressed the question of its blatantly symbolic value. The towers were no longer buildings, they were monumental books constructed of books.
These different levels of speech were cleverly aimed at the various possible blocks in the decision process. For example, the reference to Paris was a diplomatic allegiance to the Mayor of Paris who was in direct conflict with François Mitterrand about the location of the new library. But very few architectural critics – and nobody on the jury – really questioned this promotional apparatus.3)

A public space is more than an open space

Coming from a well educated architect, the reference to the Palais Royal cannot be taken seriously. The Palais-Royal is a mixed-purpose real-estate complex comprising several intertwined public and private uses. It is a place where interior and exterior, inside and ouside, private and public, space and form, all overlap in a complex whole; not a simple monolithic space but a succession of covered and open pedestrian spaces that blend in natural continuation with the surrounding urban fabric. In short, the Palais-Royal is a true urban structure. Yet in truth the new library is off to one side of the urban fabric, and the fact that it possesses a large open space does not mean that it relates correctly to the neighbourhood (some object-like buildings may have greater communication with their surroundings than such an open space).
There is more. If the esplanade may be considered as an open space accessible to everyone if not contributing to the urban continuity, this is hardly the case with the garden, which is closed to the public.4) When referring to the Palais-Royal, the architect was not calling for a specific urban quality. He was just stating some dimensional and proportional characteristics. The garden of the TGB and the Palais-Royal were said to bear the same size and proportion. This is true in plan but not in three dimensions. In fact, the garden cross-section ratios, surrounding building height against garden width and length, are respectively 1/5.5, and 1/13.5 for the Palais Royal, and 1/2.53 and 1/7.65 for the Library. In other words, in order to have the same proportions as those of the Palais Royal, the Library should have been half its present height, something the architect could scarcely have failed to see.
The reference to large Parisian open spaces like the Place de la Concorde or the Champ de Mars is also a misuse. Of course, when the Library was designed, the whole zone around the site was derelict industrial land wedged between the river to the north and the railway in the south, and the new library was to be the first building of the new quarter. A large new street, the ‘avenue de France’, was planned to be opened up above the railway tracks on the south side of the site. Perrault’s esplanade connects at the level of the future street but stands several metres above natural ground on the river side, so that a set of monumental stairs wraps around the library creating an anti-urban barrier. The new ‘avenue de France’ (a strange avenue indeed, which does not lead anywhere and stops at the periphery of the city) is the only element Perrault’s scheme takes account of. The relationship to the river is only a visual relation from the esplanade, and the stairs (50 steps) which lead down to the river are blocked by the traffic of the quay.
Perrault’s project was in fact designed as an autonomous object with no regard for the context. An important collateral effect of this conception is that the architect had no real control of the ‘magical’ space he wanted to create between his towers, since the definition of the limits of that space had to be built by other architects. The disruptive presence of the housings on the two lateral sides of the Library shows the problematical relationship of the project with its surroundings. Needless to say, the space will even be more affected when buildings are erected on the other side of the avenue de France.

A book is a duck

Symbolically, it may be strange that a new library designed for the coming century and receptive to new technologies that would allow access by computer, is given the shape of four open books – old books, not even electronic ones. It is true that these new electronic books have no physical reality which would have made difficult Perrault’s analog approach and his way of bringing meaning to his buildings.5) Probably the reference to old books unconciously reassured a political power that seems scared of the emerging communication technologies. Since the main issue is the the control of knowledge by power, a building that would express the resistance of the old culture to a new, as yet uncontrolled civilization, would appear to be the most adequate solution.
This attitude of resistance can also be read in the position of the archives. The TGB is a conservative building for a conservative power. The archives seem to be inaccessible, and nowhere does the building express the production of knowledge or the community of thinkers.6)
Therefore, the interpretation of the Library as articulating the resistance of an old literary culture may not be so legitimate. Architecture is ill-equipped to represent a resisting culture. Architecture is not a book; Hugo once said that ‘This will kill that. The book will kill buildings’.7) Would today’s architecture save books? Not at all, indeed the reverse applies: what kind of thought lies behind an architecture that identifies towers with books? The same one as the one which identifies a hot-dog stand with a sausage: advertising thinking. We are far from high French culture, and to put it differently, in Venturi’s term, the Bibliothèque de France is a pure ‘duck’.8)

An anti-functional building

Ad thinking is very common to Perrault who mostly operates with slogans.9) There is no reason to be against slogans if they are grounded in true thinking, or against metonymical approachs as long as they entertain the architect’s imagination. With Perrault, however, slogans are used to distort reality and present himself as an avant-garde architect:
‘The Library is the first contemporary monument to meet the independence of uses with the void’
‘There is an independence between containing form and content’
‘Form no longer follows function, it contains it’10)
Here Perrault is not trying to promote formal relativism (anything goes, since form is free from function), he is just rediscovering twenty-five years on, without knowing it, Aldo Rossi’s famous dictum of ‘distributive indifference’.11) His purpose is to justify changes to the project during its development and to show that the building has not lost its coherence through that process.
And changes there were. The capacity of books increased from 5 to 12 million following the transfer of collections from rue Richelieu. New storage was added in the basement between the reading rooms and the technical belt. At the same time, under the pressure of the users, some offices had to be moved into the towers, so that today only one third of the books are in the towers, which brings the identification of towers with books into difficulties.12) But thanks to the independence of form and function, the shape of the building has not changed, save for the towers which were reduced from some 100 m to 80 to satisfy City of Paris requirements. And the major quality of the building would no longer be its symbolic dimension, but this absence of relationship between form and content.13)

‘A New Minimalism’

According to Perrault, ‘contemporary architects have stopped referring to the Bauhaus and to Cubism’ in their artistic applications. So the new Library would be the first building to show ‘the emergence of a New Minimalism’, and the architect would then play the part of a new avant-garde. Here again he calls upon a slogan to support his position. ‘The Library is not made with materials but with matter.’
Perrault’s minimalism really is a new concept. Donald Judd’s or Frank Stella’s notions of minimalism are totally foreign to such ‘duck symbolism’. But Perrault is looking for something else. He wants to avoid the conventional arbitrariness of an architectural language, which the other Perrault (Charles) discussed as early as 1688 in the ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’. His obsession with signifying through non-architectural elements guided the whole design and development process. Hence his avoidance of difference and articulation as the basis of a possible language. And the Library is the realm of repetition. The result is a very stiff and monachal environment with all expression repressed. For instance, there is no visible trace of the welter of technological devices the building required to get a perfect climatic control. The result is a similar absence of human scale, that is, the inpossibility of relating in dimension and proportion to the size of the building, which therefore looks more like a big model than a real building.
There are four materials used: glass, concrete, metal and wood. Each needed specific technological elaboration in order to keep its essential aspect.
As against the traditional curtain-wall, which only provides a flat surface, glass was originally supposed to bring transparency to the building, but after completion and the many criticisms about absence of transparency, this theme was relinquished by the architect. However, glass constitutes the skin of the building, a skin which allows perception of depth by showing the wooden shutters beyond. In order to reach this effect, a specific quality of glass was developed that could preserve the colour of the okoumé from the outside, while at the same time great care was taken to satisfy the fire regulations. Two sheets of glass, the external one being fireproof, sit in 3,60 x 1,80 x 0,10 m panels. The intervening space in each panel is controlled by a mechanical system so as to avoid producing condensation on the glass. These panels form the repetitive unit which uniformly covers the entire building. This uniformity is its main property, and it seems that the architect saw in the perfect development of a single module the best way to control the production of the Library from start to finish.
In the detailing, elements are not articulated but merely juxtaposed. And inside, the different materials are simply but elegantly placed side by side. The high quality concrete is left raw, the furniture is treated in unity with the wooden panels, and the various stainless steel meshes add an impression of sustainability. Articulation is here replaced by work on the correct position of the elements in relation to each other, and everything, remarkably, seems at the right place, except maybe the ‘African-dirt’ coloured fitted carpet already gracing the entrance hall, which will probably look like ‘Parisian dirt’ before long.14)
Readings rooms for researchers only will open in the summer of 1998. At the moment, the new library doesn’t seem to be attracting much in the way of a public (only 900 persons a day during the first three month of 1997, less than a third of the expected number; compare this with 12,000 persons a day at the library of Centre Pompidou). The Bibliothèque de France will no doubt serve as a unique tool well used by professional searchers, and the spaces on offer to them at the garden level are the finest in the building. However, it seems the greatest challenge of the coming years will be to infuse life into a building which has been designed with no regard for people, and to find the way to create a true link between the public, the life in the city, and what is at present an inert monument.

1. It would be wrong to think that the new library will end the spatial dispersion of the collections. Manuscripts and drawings are to remain in the old library, and the collections of the library of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts will probably go there to fill up the vacant spaces. New workshops, laboratories and storage rooms were built at the same time in Marne-la-Vallée. The new library, though the largest in the world, is only the major element in the redistribution of the old library collection.

2. Four projects were in fact presented to Mitterand: Perrault’s, Chaix and Morel’s, Kaplicky’s, and Stirling and Wilford’s. Perrault’s design was clearly preferred above the others.

3. Rykwert and Le Dantec were two who did, and built their opposition to the project around the anti-functional and anti-urban character of the scheme.

4. The garden of the Palais-Royal, in accordance with Richelieu’s wishes, has remained a public open space since it was laid out.

5. Perrault built an electronic engineering school in Marne-la-Vallée designed like a gigantic computer keyboard. The metonymy that identifies towers with open books formed part of Perrault’s rhetoric as early as the competition stage. (This, it is said, was decisive in swaying Mitterand’s judgement).

6. The monumental stairs, by breaking urban continuity, reinforce this image of inaccessible archives. But paradoxically they also allow direct contact with the building from all sides. It seems that the esplanade is a very difficult space to control since no ‘social’ or ‘urban’ control exists, and it is the only square in Paris that has been completely closed in with fences in a move to combat terrorism.

9. The only reason I can see for Perrault getting the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion Award this year is that Perrault’s architecture is the most perfect expression of today’s zeitgeist, call it what you will, a culture of advertising or an industry of emptiness.

12. Though there are still some offices without natural light.

13. Perrault never questions the conditions that make such distributive indifference possible, and what it really means in spatial terms. A richness in potentials or singularities is a prior conditions for all actualization (cf. the notion of ‘any-space-whatever’ in Deleuze).

14.The choice of wood treatment for the esplanade shows the same inappropriateness. When it rains, the ground gets very slippery and difficult to walk on. To solve this problem mats of artificial grass have been installed at the top of the travelators leading down to the entrances.