From the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
one last project The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BNF) was one of Mitterand’s last great schemes, designed to embed the name of the president in France’s glorious history. On a drizzly Sunday morning, the library’s enormous towers, jutting out of the labyrinthine tunnels in which the books are kept, seem desolate. Housed in the 14 th arrondissement, and surrounded by new architectural schemes, it is as solitary as everything that surrounds it: a series of towers, all exposed innards and characterless glass, which do not talk to each other. The sounds are just as solitary. The boardwalks between the towers are immense, like a lost beach-promenade from an
enormous sea, and, this early in the morning, there are just a few dedicated joggers running around and around. You hear them pass, their feet heeled in the latest trainers, pound into the wood, and then the sound escapes; the architecture here is less an envelope than a whirlpool, which sucks you back into something that feels like silence. It would be hard though, to say there is a silence of the library. The library, like the towers around it, are a way of removing silence, and not cultivating it; their glory is too big, and too isolated, to allow things to be heard.
In the graveyard, in the middle of the money
giulio petrocco
the sound of the dead The 14 th is unlike any other arrondissement of Paris; its hyper- modernist lines and clear avenues recall the small winding streets of Monmartre only as their antonym. It feels rather as if Haussmann – the architect who created those endless boulevards in the centre of Paris – has been updated for the twenty-first century. If the 14 th has a brother, it is La Défense, the financial district, which was placed just outside of Paris. Between enormous tower blocks there are small squares, full of elaborate restaurants, ready to serve bankers on expense accounts. The whole place – aurally and architecturally – can only make sense on a weekday, when it is full of people, and the chattering of clients over steak tartare
mirrors the keyboards clicking in the towers above: there is money to be made, and people to meet. All the lines of the architecture are designed for maximum efficiency, and the restaurants and shops change without anyone much noticing; everything here is exchangeable, nothing particular. On a Sunday, it all seems without direction. There is a silence here, but it is the silence of a place out-of-time. The sounds don’t belong to the place, but either to the drifters (a tramp, a plastic bag) that have stolen into the area – to be removed with the beginning of the working week – or to restaurant signs, hanging uselessly in the wind. It is the silence of ghosts.
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