Dominique Perrault is the principal and founder of the architectural practice Perrault Projects, established in Paris in 1981. He achieved international recognition in 1989, when at the age of 35 he was awarded the commission for perhaps the grandest of French President Mitterand’s projects, the National Library of France in Paris, completed in 1995. Perrault’s approach could be seen as part of a European trend, loosely defined as Supermodernism, including the work of Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel, and Rem Koolhaas. In Perrault’s architecture, technological expression is tempered by a minimalist aesthetic, often making use of bold geometric forms at a monumental scale combined with subtle tectonic qualities, material textures, and lighting effects.
The practice built its early reputation on a series of large-scale industrial commissions, such as the Traffic Control Centre for the Peripherique in Paris (1984); the University for Electric Engineering, Marne-la-Vallée, Paris (1987); and the Water Purification Plant, Ivry-sur-Seine (1987, completed in 1993). Each of these projects deploys a complex range of geometric forms, but it was the monumental simplicity of the Hotel Industriel Jean-Baptiste Berlier (1990) in Paris that directed Perrault’s later work. This bold glass rectangular slab containing ten stories of open-plan workspace stands out alongside a chaotic edge-city context of highways and railroad tracks. The sleek external skin contrasts with the concrete and stainless-steel interior, and the whole building displays a quiet monumentality that sets it apart from its unpromising surroundings.
The Center for Book Treatment, Bussy St. Georges, France (1995), the Olympic Velodrome and Swimming Pool, Berlin (1999), and the Media Library, Venissieux, France (2001), display a similar combination of pure geometry and smooth external surface treatment. The Olympic Velodrome and Swimming Pool project’s dramatic sunken landscape setting also hints at another source of inspiration for Perrault, who has written of his interest in the work of Earthworks artists such as Walter de Maria and Richard Long. Another touchstone for this more recent preoccupation with the relationship between architecture and landscape—or as Perrault describes it, a concern with geography rather than history and a wish to create places as opposed to buildings— is the house he designed for himself and his partner on the Normandy coast in the north of France. Sunk into the ground along its northern side, the house seems little more than a wall with a large opening framing a view of the garden, and it is the desire to dissolve the building into the landscape design that characterizes two of the more substantial recent projects. His mysterious, almost evanescent installation/house project titled Kolonihavehus, Copenhagen, and designed for the Copenhagen as European Capital of Culture Exhibition (1996) sits like a minimalist cube in a quiet forested landscape.
The redevelopment of the Uni Metal planning project in Caen (1995) and the Plant APLIX (1999) in Nantes also adopt a landscape strategy comprising gridded territories to define areas for building. A more extreme case of this deference to context can be seen at the Conference Center Usinor-Salicor at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (1991), where an underground space is created beneath an existing villa and roofed with a flat glass disk surrounding the historic structure. In addition to these and other built projects, Perrault has also undertaken a number of competitions and studies, most notably Library Kansai Khan, Kyoto (1996), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), and the Cultural Center, Santiago de Compostela (1999).
In 1997 he was awarded the Mies van der Rohe Foundation prize for his National Library, deservedly the practices’ most widely regarded project, particularly for its effect at the urban scale. The building consists of four 22-story L-shaped towers containing the book storage spaces and administrative offices, sheathed in a double skin of timber shutters and an outer curtain-wall of full-height glazing. The towers sit at the four corners of a colossal elevated rectangular platform, which is covered in simple timber decking and surrounded by steps leading up from the street level. The effect of this “ziggurat,” which contains the reading areas, is to create a grand ceremonial space above—somewhat isolated from everyday life—that increases the sense of ritual in approaching the building. This is reinforced by the enormous central garden into which the visitor descends toward the two main entrances, and once inside, a similarly monumental scale is maintained through the smooth surfaces and minimal detailing. The most dramatic of the interior finishes involves the use of woven metal textiles, which produce varying effects of translucency that Perrault has experimented with on other projects.
JONATHAN A.HALE
Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.3 (P-Z). Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005. |
