Très Grande Bibliothèque, OMA's 1989 project for a national
library in Paris, is being exhumed from the archive for an
exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture
(CCA) in Montreal. The exhibition, curated by Rem Koolhaas and
Clément Blanchet, presents models, drawings and research produced
by OMA in response to an international competition launched by
France's then president, François Mitterrand. OMA's design was
for a giant cube with areas of emptiness that would
accommodate the library's
various functions - a "strategy of the
void".
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.
18 May
