Dhe year 1981, in which the then 28-year-old architect Dominique Perrault opened his architecture office in Paris, was also the year in which François Mitterrand was elected France’s first socialist president. For the construction sector, this election marked the beginning of an era of “Grands Projets” – huge cultural buildings with which the new president wanted to make France’s claim to be a cultural nation for all citizens visible in the Parisian cityscape.
The new triumphal arch called Arche de la Défense, the new opera at the Bastille, the pyramid in the Louvre: all these major projects were planned at that time, and that their forms all corresponded to monumental stereometric basic bodies – the triumphal arch is a cuboid, the opera a cylinder, the Louvre entrance a pyramid – was for some a proof of Mitterrand’s pharaonic claim to want to leave behind built signs for eternity like ancient rulers. The Grand Projet, completed in the last year of Mitterrand’s tenure, deviates from this iconography, although it is also highly symbolic.
The Berlin Velodrome
:
Bild: Picture Alliance
The new national library was opened in 1995 in the 13th arrondissement, close to the city highway, the Périphérique. With her, the architect Dominique Perrault became internationally known. His design consists of four corner towers reminiscent of open books. Made entirely of glass, they reveal wooden built-in shelving, giving the towers a golden glow from afar. Below the towers, the workplaces are arranged around a 10,000 square meter inner courtyard, which is more reminiscent of a wild forest: 250 oak, pine and birch trees grow there, the city is hidden; only when you go to the upper deck, from which a staircase hundreds of meters wide leads down to the Seine, does it come back into view all the more dramatically.
Dominique Perrault in July 2020 at the Poste du Louvre building currently being renovated
:
Bild: picture alliance / abaca
The reduced large forms are typical of Perrault, who was born in 1953: the garden looks like a piece of gigantic land art, a forest that has been cut into a square and transplanted into the city, the towers glow at night like abstract sculptures and are reflected in the Seine, which provides some consolation for the library’s numerous functional shortcomings. Even Perrault’s first building, the seat of the College of Electrical Engineers near Paris, was a similarly reduced large form. Five high-rise blocks were connected by a three-hundred-meter-long, multi-storey ramp, which houses the complex’s public functions. Bonded glass made the build look even smoother and seamless; Perrault often anticipated the surface perfection of the iPhone age.
His office quickly grew into an international architecture company that has implemented hundreds of projects: Perrault built many stadiums, such as the Velodrom in Berlin, and countless, sometimes rather mannered residential and office towers, which were awarded for using an exemplary amount of operating energy as far as possible to save. For Seoul, Perrault designed a spectacular, kilometer-long, narrow Central Park in which green areas, open-air cinemas, bicycle paths and squares are to alternate and which aims to organize the densely built-up city around a new form of public space. Dominique Perrault turns seventy this Sunday.