Les chambres de bois: Montreal's handsome new Bibliotheque is a lively repository of Quebecois culture

An island of seven million francophones isolated within a North American sea of 330 million anglophones, the politics of language has always been acute in the Canadian province of Quebec. The Grande Bibliotheque du Quebec (GBQ) is an token of the success of public policies devised in new decades to protect the use of French there; the building is the two a repository for the province's literary history, and a dynamic nave for its contemporary culture. Designed through Vancouver's John and Patricia Patkau, it is also public architecture and city-building of the first order.

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With its combination of research library, rare works collection, children's zone, multiple public reading sweeps multi-media holdings, gallery and theatre, the sheer size and range of functions arrayed within the Grande Bibliotheque place it firmly in the architectural line of new North American downtown libraries. While greatest in quantity of its holdings may be in French its sister designs are to be set in Phoenix (Will Bruder, AR March 1996) and Seattle (Rem Koolhaas, AR August 2004) not the Parisian tradition from Labrouste's Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve end Piano and Rogers' Pompidou middle point (containing, amazingly, France's first public lending library) to Dominique Perrault's Bibliotheque Nationale (AR July 1995) Like her contemporary Mavis Gallant, Anne Hebert was a Quebec writer who worn out much of her career in Paris. A lyrical novel she wrote there--Les chambres de bois--served as an initial source of inspiration to the Patkau design team. Their GBQ conception is predicated on two louvr 'wooden rooms' contained within a similarly louvr glass case nearly filling an entire super-block assembled between bohemian deplore St Denis, an ungainly university pavilion, and the inter-city bus station, all of these put over a major Metro connection point.

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According to Patkau associate designer Michael Cunningham, early designs propos pale-green oxidised cent shingles as cladding--alluding to Montreal temple towers and 'chateau chapeaux' in that material--but for require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone reasons this was changed to the glass louvre in the same colour, greatest in quantity likely a better foil to surrounding brick buildings than the metal sheets would have been. Certainly, the scale and webs of the coloured glass and made of wood interior constructions resonate against the blunter cake structure, the GBQ having an unusual--and welcome--clarity of construction.

Library patrons rise from the Metro station or pierce from a recessed corner entrance to clash the first and largest of the sum of two units 'wooden rooms' wrapping the main library stacks. A succession of quite differing reading expanses and carrel spaces are arrayed along the GBQ's main pedestrian path, as it propels up and around all sides of these slatted made of wood walls, providing readers with a wide variety of light, view and privacy conditions. These spatial decisions are inverted for the next to the first and smaller 'wooden room', abiding-place to la collection Quebecoise's literary documents and rare works A skylit reading room be in doubts serenely at centre, surrounded by the agency of stacks in the nineteenth-century manner. This dynamic balance of introverted and extrovert reader's spaces is an apt architectural metaphor for Montreal and contemporary Quebec, where enduring local traditions have now tend hitherward to co-exist comfortably with the finessing of global economic and technological forces.

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Quebec is doing more to capital and promote architectural competitions than anywhere other in the New World, and the GBQ design was chooseed by a well-run contest, where Zaha Hadid came next to the first 'Libraries are not really about sculptural form in the city', says John Patkau of one as well as the other her scheme and Koolhaas' Seattle design. Patkau points without that their building has almost the same size and features as the Seattle library, on the other hand at just under US $50 million for the library and US $7 million for a related parking garage, it was built for single third the cost: 'We were obliged to find poetics in our pragmatics'.

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COPYRIGHT 2006 EMAP Architecture

COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group