In the same way that it helps to have read Pushkin and Gogol to understand the present day Russian Czar and his bureaucracy, the grand new public libraries opened in London and Paris at the end of the millennium say something about the differences in their cities, their histories and the societies that built them. Old habits and traditions die hard.
The TGB, la Très Grande Bibliothèque, or the Very Big Library to use its common name, (officially called the Bibliothèque Nationale de France), was the last of Francois Mitterand’s Grand Projets, his most ambitious, civic, political and cultural gesture, clearly designed to bolster French prestige and the importance of Paris. The library is on the left bank of the Seine in a run down area of to the east of the Gare d’Austerlitz, and the project was consciously conceived as a stimulus to the urban renewal of the unfashionable 13’ arrondissement. It remains to be seen if this library building does become a catalyst in this way or whether it will stand as a folly of political ambition.
Boldly Parisian in scale, the new library covers an area as big as the Place de la Concorde, a breathtakingly simple composition that is quite perverse in its organisation with the readers below ground and the books above. The architect Dominique Perrault has skilfully distilled what must have been an enormous and complex brief of requirements into this deceptively simple arrangement The site is dominated by four L-shaped 20-storey glass towers, one on each corner containing some offices but mostly the book stacks. When seen from a distance the towers are so far apart that, although obviously related in some way, it is hard to grasp that they are all part of one building. They are often described as resembling open books (why do people always seek such simple symbolism?) and they sit on an enormous open plaza. This plaza is the roof of a six-storey building which covers the whole site and has a long narrow central courtyard patterned on the Palais Royale and containing mature trees. This rectangular podium is sunken into the ground however, so it is only a storey above the surrounding streets. No entrance is visible as you approach and there is no sense of the immense size of this buried base. You enter by ascending a continuous flight of wooden stairs around the building up onto the