French apply Bruno Gaudin Architectes has accomplished a 15-year challenge to renovate and open up the historic rue de Richelieu web site of the Nationwide Library of France in Paris, incorporating new public routes and areas.
Accomplished within the late nineteenth century by architect Henri Labrouste, the library is taken into account a masterpiece of the Beaux Arts type, with huge, skylit studying rooms framed by slender metal columns and extremely ornamental arches.
Topic to piecemeal renovations within the Fifties, by the top of the Twentieth century the library had change into largely out of date, with its main collections moved to the library’s François-Mitterand web site, accomplished by Dominique Perrault in 1995.
Following an intensive overhaul, the rue de Richelieu web site now homes studying rooms for the Nationwide Library of France alongside the Library of the Nationwide Institute for Artwork Historical past and the Library of the École Nationale des Chartes.
“After 15 years of labor, we’ve got returned a constructing that has been profoundly reworked to satisfy the up to date challenges of welcoming the general public, opening it as much as town and sharing and exchanging with the youthful generations,” stated Bruno Gaudin Architectes.
“Yesterday, closed in on itself, the big, magnificent, worn, fragmented, darkish and dilapidated treasure chest has now been given a brand new identification, full of sunshine,” the apply stated.
In an effort to preserve the library open, work was break up into two phases, with the primary section of the challenge accomplished in 2016 and specializing in reconfiguring the circulation within the entrance of the constructing alongside rue Richelieu.
Persevering with this technique, the just lately accomplished second section has created a wholly new entrance and landscaped courtyard alongside the rue Vivienne, remodeling what have been beforehand the rear facades of the constructing into a brand new, open frontage.
“The design of the brand new entrance, with its planted threshold open to town, displays the establishment’s want to ask everybody to find its world, each a researching library and a museum,” defined the apply.
The library’s two entrances create an east-west axis centred across the library’s nice corridor, the place the up to date renewal is signalled by the changing of the principle staircase with a big aluminium-clad spiral stair.
To the northeast, the Oval Room accommodates the library’s solely freely accessible studying room, which has been up to date with new shelving and mirrored gentle fittings knowledgeable by its curved form that replicate the encompassing ebook stacks.
Resulting from its standing as a heritage web site, the richly adorned Labrouste Room to the west was topic to a extra standard restoration challenge accomplished by the chief architect of Historic Monuments, Jean-François Lagneau.
The adjoining central bookstack area within the southeastern nook of the positioning had been topic to many historic transformations, prolonged by Michel Roux-Spritz within the mid-Twentieth century so as to add a brand new basement and higher areas.
Whereas this area was not protected as a historic monument, Bruno Gaudin Architectes selected to make a characteristic of its layered historical past, stripping it again to create a big studying room linked by metal staircases and walkways.
“The work on the bookstack storage areas supplied a possibility to underscore the reinterpretation and transformation of a serious historic area on the positioning,” stated the apply.
“The need to spotlight the bookstack storage space’s historical past coupled with the usage of a up to date architectural vocabulary…the challenge and its instruments reveal the poetics of the place,” it continued.
On the primary ground, the east and west of the positioning have been related by a brand new “gallery of glass”, a glazed hall with a glass ground providing views out throughout the roof and resulting in a brand new museum area and the division of cash, medals and antiques.
“The glass gallery gives a view to the roof and the sky, with a stunning view of the domes of the Labrouste corridor,” stated the apply.
“The translucent glass flooring enable gentle to penetrate downward, accentuating the attractive verticality of the staircase’s rotunda,” it continued.
Behind the scenes, the back-of-house areas embrace newly created and restored archival storage areas, in addition to massive, ethereal workers areas within the library’s attic.
Earlier tasks by Bruno Gaudin Architectes embrace a library constructing for Paris Nanterre college which is clad in skinny, gray bricks and options an irregularly colonnaded “wind tower”.
One other current library renovation passed off in London, the place Studio Weave added a wood-lined neighborhood area to an east London library.
The images is by Takuji Shimmura except acknowledged in any other case.
