A new building in the heart of Paris is a true rarity in these
days of fervent architectural preservationism, but one has nevertheless
gone up in the Latin Quarter, designed for some of France’s
most elite scholars.
As if ashamed
of itself (or hiding from preservationists), the new library extension
of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, alma mater of such luminaries
as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, is hidden away in
and accessible only from the school’s private courtyard.
The building is visible to the public from the back, on the Rue
Rataud.
It has been
nearly 10 years since architect Philippe Gazeau won the competition
for the building’s design, but it has taken that long to
wade through the bureaucratic maze that must be navigated to put
up a new building in the city. Part of the delay was caused by
actions taken by two neighborhood associations, whose objections
were dismissed in the end since the area around the building site
has no particular architectural heritage to protect. A walk through
the student quarter immediately surrounding the ENS reveals plenty
of 20th century buildings with little to recommend them.
Budget constraints
imposed by a publicly financed project also quashed many of the
architect’s ideas, such as hanging bookshelves. On a recent
visit to the empty building, Gazeau seemed especially proud of
the system of glass shutters controlled by sophisticated individual
motors of the type used in nuclear plants. Each shutter is a sandwich
of two sheets of tempered glass and two of EVA film, with a thin
sheet of perforated stainless steel between them. With a flip
of a switch, the shutters – which when fully open stand
perpendicular to the glass façade – can be partially
or entirely closed to control the amount of light entering the
library’s main reading room.
These shutters
also form the main point of interest on an otherwise undistinguished
façade. Inside, a handsome concrete stairway, woven metal
half walls and another stairway wrapped Christo-style in a textile
composite liven up the otherwise grim interior.
Let’s
hope the installation of the books and a human presence will add
some color to the interior’s unremittingly grayness. The
only touch of color was provided by a strip of purple carpeting
and some orange electrical outlets.
The building,
which replaces a temporary structure put up in the courtyard after
World War II, is topped by what looks like an afterthought, a
block of 59 dormitory rooms. These personality-free institutional
rooms make you feel sorry for the students who will have to live
in them until you remember that as some of the country’s
top brains the “normale supes” have maid
service and free room and board.
It seems
a shame that when Paris does get a rare new building, it has to
be hidden away and submit to so many design compromises. But then
perhaps it would have been a good idea to hide another library,
the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which would still
have been a disaster even if its architect, Dominique Perrault,
hadn’t been forced to truncate the tops of its four “book-shaped”
towers to placate critics.
Heidi
Ellison
©
2006 Paris Update |
