💡 “The book will kill the building”
Yes, someone actually said that, but not about this building
Today begins an occasional series about great buildings and why I love them. It’s only natural that I’d start with my very favorite one, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris.
It was designed by architect Henri Labrouste and built from 1838 to 1851. Enjoy!
“The book will kill the building. . . .
“. . . the book of stone, so solid and durable, would give place to the book of paper, even more solid and durable. . . . The printing press will kill architecture. . . .
‘“ . . The great poem, the great building, the masterpiece of mankind will no longer be built, it will be printed.”
~ Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris, 1832 edition1
In the third semester of my MFA program, we had to do a close-read essay.2 A close-read is pretty much the literary equivalent to what, in architecture, we call precedent analysis. For this post, I’ll take you through Labrouste’s library using that lens.
I’ve been obsessed with this building since my undergrad days. I’ve made three pilgrimages to it over the years and my admiration grows every time I study it. It’s like a book you can reread endless times and always find something new.
I don’t want to oversell how amazing this building is, but, honestly, that’s just not possible. So, let’s get into it, starting with Victor Hugo. How does a beloved French novelist figure in the story of this building?
Turns out in 1832, Hugo added a few chapters to his famous novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, to create the definitive eighth edition that we know today. And he asked the up-and-coming, 30-year-old architect Henri Labrouste to proofread and criticize one of the new chapters, “This will kill that.” I could probably write a whole post just on this, but here’s the top-level:
Labrouste was educated in the French system. As a rising star fresh out of school, he got to live in Rome for five years supported by the French government to document antiquities. Nice work, if you can get it. Following in the footsteps of his masters and peers, the idea was to convert classical laws of proportion and details into formulas for architects building in Paris.
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But when he returned, Labrouste joined with a group of young upstarts to rebel against what was then known as “Neoclassicism.” He believed that such uncritical copying was irrelevant to the current moment, which was vibrant with new building materials like iron, innovations in painting and literature, and social and political upheavals. He declared that reproducing examples of past glory resulted in buildings that expressed nothing of contemporary culture. They looked good but were shallow and meaningless.
The movement he and his friends started was first called Romanticism, then later “Neo-Grec,” but by any name their chief aim was to advance the culture of architecture through the use of symbolism and metaphor. I know, right? Metaphor isn’t just for literature. We use it in architecture as well.
I’m astounded (okay, make that jealous) that someone at the tender age of thirty-seven would be handed such an incredible commission as to design this brand-new library. Here’s what I’m not jealous about: Labrouste was to spend the next thirteen years supervising the design, construction and, importantly, decoration of this masterpiece. Thirteen years! The longest projects I worked on were two, at most three, years in the making, and there were days when I was either so bored or so frustrated that I wanted to throttle someone. Even with such a plum project, I seriously doubt I would’ve had the patience to stick it out: the screw-ups, the budgets blown, the clients saying “no, that’s the wrong white.” His perseverance alone is worthy of admiration.
This fall, we’re going to assign this to a group of grad students in an advanced design studio. Their work may well warrant an update on this post in a couple months. Who knows? We’ll just have to see what emerges. Meanwhile, here’s a pictorial romp through my favorite building, with diagrams I drew in grad school. Enjoy, and I’ll catch you at the end for one or two parting thoughts.
The thick arches of the street wall are not only monumentally beautiful, they also resist the horizontal forces placed on them by the iron roof structure inside. They are self-buttressing (compare this with a Gothic cathedral, with its visible buttresses on the exterior walls). More on these thick arched piers later.
These diagrams illustrate how Labrouste redefined the street edge to make more space for Soufflot’s Pantheon, a monumental secular cathedral housing France’s dead heroes in its crypt. (Which is also blissfully cool during a freak summer heatwave, I can attest.) Note how the library seems to be part of the city fabric, but is also visible as a three-dimensional object in the photo above. This is a neat trick, not easy to pull off.
This was the first library to be open at night, lit by gas jets. Some critics and historians point to the need for a fireproof building to explain Labrouste’s extensive use of structural iron. It’s certainly one factor, but the primary reasons were spatial and metaphorical. The front door is flanked by stone flames to symbolize the light of knowledge as well as the gas lighting within.
As you probably noticed with the city diagrams above, Labrouste had to make the best of a tight site. He wanted the library to have a forecourt planted with trees and decorated with statues, so as patrons left the bustling city, they could shift into a more contemplative mood. Since that wasn’t possible, he represented an idealized sculpture court in the entrance lobby.
The entrance “garden” leads to a stair that itself summarizes the transition from a low, stone-encased base to the soaring, iron-supported space above. Even the stone railing and iron lamps mimic this stone-base-iron-top vocabulary.
In Italy, Labrouste drew reconstructions of the ancient Greek Temple of Hera I at Paestum, which had a row of columns lengthwise down the center—rare for a temple. A sacred building is almost always open down the center. Some point to Paestum as a precedent for this building, but it could also be that Labrouste drew from the Gothic refectory, a utilitarian, nonhierarchical space that also has columns down the center.
Labrouste called this library a “secular temple,” hence the row of columns down the center. They are not required structurally, as iron is strong enough to span the entire width.
The thick stone arches that buttress the walls also act as fins internally to reduce glare and enhance the sense of openness.
The stone piers supporting the iron roof vaults are carved with heads representing night and day (closed eyes or open eyes).
The exterior bolts are detailed like classical “paterae” to visually support the stone-carved garland. They are literally tie-bolts connecting the roof structure through the stone wall to effectively transfer the horizontal thrust of the roof into the wall to run vertically, pulled by gravity. This moment in the building is a perfect marriage of physics and art. (To see the paterae on the exterior, scroll back up to the view of the front door or the overall view.)
Saving one of the best details for last: the panels beneath the windows are carved with hundreds of author names. The texture resembles words on a page or rows of books stacked in a library—which is literally what’s on the other side of those panels.
This building was considered by the gatekeepers of French style to be proof that Labrouste was a dangerous radical. He and his students were ostracized for the rest of his career. His students received no medals or awards and they weren’t offered jobs. He barely eked out a living in his studio. I’ve always wondered why this building and the amazing addition he did to the Bibliothèque Nationale are the only two major public buildings that he seems to have completed.
Influential critics like Sigfried Giedion praised Labrouste’s masterpiece for its modernity and “rationalism,” reducing it to a building that shows off the engineering of the iron roof structure. Iron was not uncommon at the time, but it was always hidden behind stonework evoking the glories of ancient Rome. But Giedion missed the point entirely. The decoration of the building was critical to its expressive meaning.
That metaphoric clothing is the difference between problem-solving engineering and soul-soaring art. This debate continues in architecture to this day.
There is always more to say about this building. For instance, did you know that a famous American architecture firm copied it for one of their libraries? Would you like to know more about that? Or, maybe you’re curious about how architects use diagrams like these to design our projects. Ask me anything. I’m an open book. Or, in this case, a library.
Quoted in Drexler, Arthur, ed., The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1975, p.356.
For that, I studied five pages in Brian Doyle’s Mink River, which is a marvel of a book. I’m so enamored, it’s the subject of my essay for
’s fab Substack, The Books that Made Us. Coming soon . . . ish.
Beautiful. My husband is an architect. I'm looking forward to having him read this! Thanks for the insight. I want to go and see it now myself.
My husband had one building on his bucket list that he told me about when we met 36 years ago. The Segrada Familia by Gaudi. We finally went to Barcelona in 2019 to see it. I was speechless. That's when I finally understood architecture as art. It was stunning. And they are still building it!
I took 3 terms of history of architecture when I was in university and loved it! This post reminded me of that, really interesting and I loved seeing the drawings.