NATIONAL LIBRARY
Étienne-Louis Boullée, 1785
The Ultimate Enlightenment Library
A national library is more than a place to store a large collection of books. It is also a home of learning, a gathering place for scholars and an important national symbol. One of the first countries to have such as library was France, where the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée created one of his greatest designs to house it. Around 330ft (100m) long, with a huge arching vault and bookcases arranged in tiers, it would have been the biggest and most imposing reading room in the world.
The library began as the royal collection of books and manuscripts in the Middle Ages. The collection grew steadily, and the growth was accelerated in the seventeenth century under Louis XIII and Louis XIV, especially during the time of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who served for a long period as Louis XIV’s Finance Minister and was a keen collector of books. As it expanded, the collection moved several times to various locations in Paris, and by the late seventeenth century was housed in the rue Vivienne. In 1692, the library took the momentous step of opening its doors to the public.
By this time, there had already been plans to move the books to still larger, purpose-built premises, but nothing came of these schemes, and as expansion continued into the eighteenth century the library became overcrowded and the need for a larger building was still more pressing. Various sites and ideas were proposed, and the architect who worked hardest to come up with a new design was Étienne-Louis Boullée.
Several challenges faced a designer of the new library: finding a suitable site, accommodating a huge number of books, providing space for readers, keeping the budget down and producing a building impressive enough to house one of the world’s greatest bibliographic collections. Boullée’s design addressed these challenges ingeniously. The architect found his site not by acquiring new land or demolishing existing buildings, but by proposing to roof over a long courtyard, about 330ft (100m) long and 100ft (30m) across, to create one enormous room. He designed an arching vault to go over the courtyard, its coffered ceiling creating the appropriate sense of grandeur, and pierced this with a large skylight. Rows of bookshelves arranged in tiers lines the long sides of the room, leaving a generous circulation space in the middle.
Boullée’s plan answered the challenges well. He could house a vast number of books (perhaps up to 300,000 volumes) and managed to fill the space with natural light from above, overcoming the problem that there could be no side windows in a room surrounded by existing buildings and lined with bookshelves. His design was visually very impressive. And because it reused the existing courtyard, it was much cheaper than a new, free-standing building would have been – one contemporary estimated Boullée’s proposal would cost only one-tenth the price of a completely new building.
The books are on open-access shelves, facing the visitor. This was in marked contrast to the old medieval way of housing books, with each volume attached to the bookcase by a chain. Although ancient, the chained library system was still widely used, and the method of storage in Boullée’s library was a way of making the collection more accessible than in many libraries. To emphasize this point, Boullée’s drawings show visitors wandering freely about the space. However, he illustrates no desks where readers could work – a strange omission, although the wide floor space could have been used to accommodate desks and chairs.
The architectural style of the interior is Classical – a sober version of the style with very plain Tuscan or Doric columns and Atlas statues. The great arching ceiling, creating a volume in the form of a half cylinder, reflects Boullée’s interest in pure geometry, as in his Newton monument (see Cenotaph for Isaac Newton entry here). The top lighting was both practical and a testimony to another of Boullée’s great interests, what he called ‘the architecture of shadows’, or how light behaves in three-dimensional spaces.
Boullée was fired with enthusiasm and did a whole series of drawings for the project, studies done with an artist’s eye for light and shade. And no wonder: Boullée had wanted to be a painter but had been forced by his father to switch to architecture. A model of the library was exhibited to the public. Most of the responses were favourable. The scheme seemed likely to go ahead – more likely indeed than other grand plans for cultural buildings that were afoot at the time, such as proposals for a new opera house. With this support and the fact that the project was such a high-profile one, it is easy to see why Boullée would have been enthusiastic. But more than this, the architect liked the way in which his building could provide a fitting home for the great works of literature that had shaped French and European civilization.
As a Classicist, Boullée looked back to the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, and saw the links between them and modern Europe. One day, he found himself thinking about these links when looking at a print of Raphael’s great fresco The School of Athens, in the Vatican. In Raphael’s painting, groups of Greek philosophers talk and debate in a vast Classical interior, parts of which have huge, semicircular, vaulted ceilings. It struck Boullée that he could allude to this great tradition of learning by arranging some of the figures in one of his drawings of the library in a way that echoed Raphael’s painting. By doing this, he was linking the learning of contemporary users of the library with those of the ancient world, and placing France and its library at the end of an illustrious tradition.
In spite of its quality, Boullée’s reading room was never built. In 1789, the French Revolution came, banishing all thoughts of major building projects in central Paris. The library had to wait until 1854 before a substantial new building was put up to house the even larger collection that had mounted up by then. The library still preserves Boullée’s drawings.
