The Very Big Library

‘THE VERY BIG LIBRARY’ -- ESSAY ON PROGRAM STUDIES OF OMA’S PROPOSAL FOR NATIONAL LIBRARY OF FRANCE

Student’s name: Ren Luo UNI: rl2590 Course: MSAAD Professor: Enrique Walker Seminar title: PROGRAM

Introduction During 1980s, being led by French president François Mitterrand, the city of Paris had been under taken a new wave of urbanization. Projects like the expansion of Louvre Museum by I.M.Pei and The Grand Arche by Johann Otto von Spreckelsen and Paul Andreu began to transform the city with monumental images of architecture. Hence it was before long that the government moved its eyes from west Paris to the east part, communities at where urged for public facilities. The competition of National Library was logically announced thereafter. The site was a vast lot with dimension of 250m x 300m x 35m in front of Seine, with railways at its back. Architects were asked to deliver a design for a cultural complex, with areas of 250,000 square meters including five libraries in one building.

At the very first beginning, the design team of OMA tried to keep the building low so that it could ‘fit into’ the city’s skyline. But soon they found out the gigantic volume of the required programs would make the building too long. And those existing buildings around the sitethe new Ministry of Finance and the Omnisport Palace at Bercy- dominated the area. The new library, being commissioned as a national symbol since beginning, had to stand out with stronger impact to the community. Hence later it was designed to be a giant 100 meters’ tall block.

A library as public facility has dual characters: on one hand it provides public spaces for people to share and absorb information; on the other hand, it acts as a warehouse storing knowledges and memories. OMA’s conceptual design for the National Library of France clearly touched this issue by making unique manifesto as well as applying powerful strategies. But before I go any further, it is necessary to examine another leap in the history of librarian architecture: the original National Library at Paris.

The Legacy of Henri Labrouste The first Bibliotheque Nationale at Paris, designed by French architect Henri Labrouste between 1858 to 1868, has been enjoying fame due to its architect’s elaborate using of steel structures. The library’s large reading room has sixteen slim cast-iron columns, all of which support those incredibly light vaults that bring natural light into this amazing public space. Before pushing his design to this level, Labrouste had already tested this technique in his previous librarian project, the library of Sainte-Genevieve: the first stand-alone librarian facility in France. From Sainte-Genevieve to Bibliotheque Nationale, however, Labrouste also contributed another break through in the program designs, which was often shadowed by his genius vision and use of iron structures.

In the design of Sainte-Genevieve Library, the reading room is a large rectangle space, which easily-even not visually-evoked the vision of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s proposal for Bibliothèque du Roi- ‘the Royal Library’- in 1785. Both designs concentrated on issue that how to deliver a solemn reading space which could fit the image of library as the temple of knowledge. Being viewed in the plans, all the service rooms were dominated by the volume of the reading room. This fact indicated a issue that in libraries, the public spaces

were not only the spiritual but as well the physical center. It occupied the priority in design process as the absolute axis of all programs.

Yet in his following work of National Library, Henri Labrouste broke this dogma by lifting up the importance of stack room, which later was called as ‘the real heart of a modern library’

by Sigfried Giedion 1 , to that of the reading rooms by giving it the same dignity as the later.

Being distributed with almost same areas, the reading room and stack room shared equal importance in Labrouste’s plan. A glass wall was installed between the two so that visual contact could be established. Through it, what contemporary readers saw was not a dark masonry room packed with books, but a well illuminated modern space with delicate glass ceilings similar to the ones in reading room. It’s floor plates, made of cast-iron as well, were perforated in order to allow natural light penetrating down to the bottom level. Hence the stack room could visually and materially possess the same central position as the reading room did.

Another potential being brought by Labrouste’s design, was how the use of building techniques and creative way of applying materials could effect the performances of building’s program hierarchy. Surely the architect changed scale proportions of public spaces and service spaces on his plan drawings; yet it would have no impact if the stack room was still a dark space and if they were not visually connected through the glass wall.

His choices of cast-iron components and glass ceilings for the stack room did not only transform the spatial quality, but also played key part to balance the importance of the two spaces. It escaped the trap of orthodoxy methods to constrain program study within the boundaries of plans and sections.

The Theory of ‘Bigness’ With five different and autonomous sub-libraries and huge collections of books and other information, the new National Library challenged the genre’s dogma even more harder.

The first and foremost issue OMA faced was the unprecedented scale this building had.

The gigantic block brought all Labrouste’s strategies into questions: the delicate glass ceilings for natural light was not a valid solution for a building with such height and depth; the simple confrontation of public spaces and stack spaces could not work, due to the dramatic size differences among five libraries and their stack rooms, as well as the complicated connections for all parts. The sweet nostalgia for Boullee’s library vision could not work here for help.

In his’ book Delirious New York, Rem Koolhaas showed his obsession on New York’s attitudes toward urbanization- ‘ culture of congestion’. In his descriptions, the true power of skyscrapers in Manhattan is not merely erecting visual icons, but repeatedly recreating the site in vertical dimension. Besides the obvious economic benefits, this strategy gave birth to a new architectural genre: such kind of building that beneath one unified facade could contain heterogeneous worlds, each one of which was not necessarily connected to others. Mean while, delicate formal traffic solutions in modern architectural movements were displaced here by elevators and escalators. Koolhaas believed that those systems could help architects to surpass the limitation of conservative experiences in architectural 1

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time & Architecture- the growth of a new tradition, P223, fifth edition, Harvard University Press, 2008

designs. His vivid description on Downtown Athlete Club became a fairy tale in the context of modern city.

Later in his essay for S, M, L, XL, Koolhaas expanded his theories, implying that the grand scale and complexity of contemporary architecture preventing architects to work on projects in old fashions. The great depth of interior spaces in modern buildings canceled the last hope for natural light and air. Architects had to turn to artificial light and air systems for help. And different organs of one building were not destined to be united any more- at least not in a formal way. The ‘Bigness’ of architecture became a double side blade: on one hand it almost killed all those old dreams of architecture; yet somehow opened new potential at the same time. In his proposal for Zeebrugge Sea Terminal, Rem test his theory by designing a mega building containing almost a entire city within: from ferry terminal, to museum; from train station to hotel. All programs were somehow independent and conflict to each other. It seems that Rem did not make huge efforts to dilute those problems, but leave them as they were. The results are constant interactions and surprise moments among those spaces.

The Strategy This strategy was adapted in OMA’s design for the ‘very big library’. Instead of design five buildings on site, one giant block of stacks was placed. It was the block of memories and informations. A vertical ‘slab’ was at one end of the block to host some of the service rooms and stairs while playing as a structural element. Therefore the block can be seen as a massive container for ‘service’ spaces. OMA reversed the logic of library design by formally putting those ‘non-public’ spaces into priority. Being compared to Labrouste’s efforts, OMA’s interpretations could be stated to allow the service area dominate the entire scheme. As Rem Koolhaas said in one speech: ’... maybe it was also possible to organize the utilitarian fields in a very boring manner, and the public space as something not to be built, but on the contrary, something that is left out, a gap or a void in those utilitarian spaces. Maybe it is possible to invent a building where the most important parts of the building are not building but absence of building.’2 The five libraries, on the other hand, were ‘carved’ through this mass into different ‘shapes’/ ‘voids’: the Library of Image and Sound was ‘the pebbles’; the Library of Current Events was ‘the intersection’; the Study Library was ‘the spiral’; The Research Library was ‘the buckle’; and ‘the shell’ contained the Catalog Room while linking the ‘spiral’ and the ‘bucle’. Just like in the Sea Terminal project, they were left to co-exist in a way of conflict and tolerance. Besides the inner logic for pragmatic use, those shapes were almost random, in terms of architectural design. Each one of them enclosed a unique ‘world’ within, which was protected by either transparent or opaque ‘skin’. The nine elevators’ shaft were made of steel and glass. Passengers were allowed to ‘traverse’ all other spaces- public or service- before reaching their destinations. By doing this, a montage of cultural fragments- words, images, public events- was born, as in Rem’s description for Down Town Athlete Club.

2

Rem Koolhaas, Rem Koolhaas : projectes urbans (1985-1990) = urban projects (1985-1990), P22, Barcelona : Col·legi d'arquitectes de Catalunya, 1990

Further more, the freedom OMA gained from this strategy was almost too good to be true.

Instead of worrying the building’s formal harmony while working on satisfying distinguish needs for various public spaces, the architects could move those spaces-now as the ‘voids’-to considerably better locations within the block’s boundaries. All those ‘organs’ were floating above the ground in the ocean of information. The mythy of architectural plan bursted at this moment because of all organs’ instable natures: their locations were not destined, but coincided. A tension merged between the orthogonal floor plates system and the diagonal ‘voids’.

Structurally, all five libraries played roles as ‘beams’, while nine elevator shafts worked as ‘column’ . Among those organs, escalators winded as traffic connections between every two ‘voids’. Additionally, a system of wall was introduced to reinforce the structure. Walls were placed every 12.5 meters in order to serve both as supporting structures and boundaries of fire compartments. Certain thickness were given to them so all ducts could be hide within. The system also provided solutions towards air conditioning in this great deep building: fresh air would be pumped into the ‘wall’ and ‘transported’ to all floors. But most of all, the walls dramatically helped to reduce the thickness of floor plates, which would have occupied 60% total height of the building. Since the stack spaces were guaranteed by all these techniques, the ‘notorious problem of a library’3 - connecting public spaces and the service, spaces’ openness and closure- was hence resolved. For each public space could own as many connections as it needed because of its scale’s flexibility: it could either be the same height as several floors, or just that of one.

Summary The evolution from Henri Labrouste to OMA demonstrates a phenomenon: the hierarchy between public space (reading rooms, halls, etc.) and service space (vertical transportations, stack rooms, offices, etc.) is deconstructed. The service space transformed from ‘shadows’ of public space in Sainte-Genevieve Library, to equivalent in the old National Library, and finally became the dominant force in OMA’s proposal. This timeline clearly unfolded a strategic way to resolve the crisis that contemporary urban complex provoked to embarras architects. Their programs’ complexities require architects to visualize a building as an attempt to enclose a entire world within. The tensions among ‘organs’ of one building are no longer the driving force for scheme’s development.

In 2004, the Seattle Central Library was opened to the public. Although differing formally from National Library of France, it still shares huge similarities with the later in many ways.

It again distributes public programs into the entire building, while modeling the giant block as a body for knowledge and information. The instability of the French project merges once again to gain flexibility for interior behaviors. Only this time, it is limited by the scale of the project: its 38,300 square meters’ areas are no match to that of the French National Library. It seems like the skin from the Paris block shrinks, due to its container’s smaller scale, tightly wrapping all organs within. The instability is therefore visualized in the most formal way. This result, to some extent, causes a more tensional relation between programs. The stack room now is merged with public spaces due to this reason. It becomes a new breed of the genre, which attempts to destroy the final evidence of the dual characters of librarian space. Now, only book stacks could define space. They are the purpose of library; the essence of library; and the final border between library.

3

Rem Koolhaas, Rem Koolhaas : projectes urbans (1985-1990) = urban projects (1985-1990), P22, Barcelona : Col·legi d'arquitectes de Catalunya, 1990

Bibliography (1) Rem Koolhaas : projectes urbans (1985-1990) = urban projects (1985-1990), Rem Koolhaas, 1990, Col路legi d'arquitectes de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain (2) Space, Time & Architecture- the growth of a new tradition, Sigfried Giedion, 2008, fifth edition, Harvard University Press, Boston, MA, United States of America (3) Small, medium, large, extra-large : Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rem Koolhaas, and Bruce Mau, Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, 1998, Monacelli Press, New York, NY, United States of America (4) Delirious New York : a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Rem Koolhaas, 1994 edition, Monacelli Press, New York, NY, United States of America (5) OMA-Rem Koolhaas : architecture, 1970-1990, edited by Jacques Lucan, English translations by David Block, 1991 edition, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY, United States of America (6) Rem Koolhaas : conversations with students, edited by Lynn Fitzpatrick and Doug Hofius, 1991, Rice University, School of Architecture, Houston, TX, United States of America