The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) presents "Très Grande Bibliothèque" ("Very Big Library"), this exhibition reveals drawings, diagrams and conceptual sketches that reveal the design process.Through the use of early 3D software, digital renderings Koolhaas explored the manipulation of the five interior volumes.
Two plaster models, created several years later, render the Very Big Library in positive and negative. While the first model shows the mass of the building and façades, the second materializes the interior voids, revealing its spatial complexity.
Conceived as a super-library that would combine national collections in one building, Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France was the last of the "Grands travaux" of the architectural program initiated by Mitterrand in 1981.This vast project included five entities: a public consultation space for audio and video archives, a space for recent acquisitions, a study library, a catalogue library; and a scientific research library that would also integrate information systems for consulting remote documents. The building is located on the east side of Paris, in an abandoned industrial zone along the
banks of the Seine and across from the Ministry of Finance and the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy.
The concept of the OMA proposal resided in the notion of the library spaces being excavated as voids from a ‘solid cube' containing the archives. This concept offered great architectural freedom, with the public spaces (or voids) being liberated from the constraints of a predetermined form or structure.
The CCA curatorial team developed the design of the exhibition. Graphic design was created by Montréal designer Tamzyn Berman of Atelier Pastille Rose.
Curators.- Rem Koolhaas and Clément Blanchet.
Date.- From 15 May until 9 September 2012.
Venue.- Octagonal Gallery. CCA. Montreal.
TEXT BY REM KOOLHAAS:
The TGB project is a testimony to the last moment of intense socialism in Europe. In 1989, it was part of a group of three radical projects (TGB in Paris, ZKM in Karlsruhe, Sea Terminal in Zeebrugge) that attempted to reorganize and renew Europe's culture. Directly inspired by our previous European projects, these three works seemed to suggest that it was possible for even the Old World to reimagine itself.
In the post-market apocalypse of the time, the TGB's ambitions marked the dawn of a new age of euphoric demonstration of state power. The French state would provide a container for the world's thinking in books and media. It would develop technologies to give access to it all, not only physically but also digitally.
1989 was, for me, an intense demonstration that architecture does not work in a vacuum. The sheer imagination and ambition invested in the TGB program demanded and enabled a parallel effort on the part of the architect. If the state was reinventing culture, the architect had to reinvent architecture.
TGB, with its twin project ZKM, formed a campaign to once and for all think through the consequences of modern technologies as enabling architecture to get rid of the architectural duties it no longer had to fulfill. As a relatively young invention in architecture's long history, it is not surprising that the applications of technologies to this point had been relatively unsophisticated.
The program was not for a single library. The issue of fragmentation was raised almost at the beginning of the enterprise, almost explicitly, and almost overtly. It is a constellation, and I think that it is the only word that could describe it: a constellation of five specific and different libraries.
The audiences and the programs of all these libraries were completely different, and the architect was asked to imagine their coexistence in a single entity. We took the program; and excavated several elements, creating a shape representing the storage and a second shape representing the public elements of the libraries. It was only when we saw this strange presence standing there on the banks of the Seine that we began to believe that we had maybe discovered something. There would also be a legitimate and interesting attempt to assemble the fragments, so as to organize in a single building the coexistence of these autonomous elements, without doing any injustice to their specificity or their programmatic delicacy.
The question of whether the plane was horizontal or vertical was moot because the two were considered almost in an equivalent sense. So the same story that is told by the plans is inevitably also told by the series of successive sections. They come closer, they intersect, and they disengage. And perhaps the most profound statement of the building, and the one which maybe gave me the most ideological satisfaction, was the single image created by superimposing all of the data. This represented the coexistence of all these elements in a single building. If one of the challenges and conditions of modernity is that all that is solid melts into air, then the TGB is at the same time a building that is melting and a building that is solid.
Rem Koolhaas, 2012
