07- Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

07- Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève - Henri Labrouste - 1851

10 Pl. du Panthéon, Paris

Henri Labrouste (Paris, 1801-1875) was a French architect. He was one of the first to understand the importance of iron in architecture, and became the center of the Rationalist movement. He is best known as the architect of the Sainte-Geneviève Library.

The long strip of land allocated to the library, forced Labrouste to rethink the classical scheme. The stone facade, classical and sober, reflects the function of the building. Decorated with 810 names of scholars, it proclaims the progress of humanity through knowledge. Labrouste adopted a new functional spatial organization based on the vertical separation between the reading room of four hundred seats on the second floor, and the stores on the first floor. He chose metal, then reserved for frameworks and utilitarian buildings, for its resistance to fire but also for its new aesthetic. In the reading room, the large barrel arches and thin cast iron columns are an integral part of the decor. The iron structure supports two adjoining vaults and allows for ample light penetration through 41 windows. Inside, a long path leads the reader from the dark first floor, decorated at the top with a soothing garden scene, to the monumental staircase dominated by a copy of Raphael’s “School of Athens”, depicting the great thinkers of antiquity, before entering the bright reading room.

The Sainte-Geneviève Library is exceptional in every way. It was the first time in France that a library was not an annex of a palace, a school or a monastery, but an independent building, It is a departure from the neo-classical style in vogue at the time for large public buildings, for a much more sober and rationalist style. It is the first metal architecture to take advantage of the physical and mechanical properties of the material to free up space and let in light. Many consider that the strenght of the building is the contrast between the heavy exterior facade, and the light-filled and open interior. The internal metal structure appears on the outside with pointed bolt heads, a way to annouce: one must proudly display the function and constructive decisions of a building. 38