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founded at the Louvre Palace, housed
in a succession of sites, then pried from
aristocratic hands during the French
Revolution. The collection expanded,
with a big assist coming from Napoleon's
conquests, and the library became public
in the 1600s. It went on to survive calamity,
including two world wars, as well as a series
of scattershot repairs in the 1950s. By the
time Bruno Gaudin was tasked with reviving
the library's block-long Richelieu site, the
literary institution was woefully unsuitable for
contemporary use. Renovating the structure
would take 15 years and two phrases to
complete, but in the end, the library had, as
the practice puts it, taken "possession of a
new, large and luminous stone vessel."
At the start of the process, in 2007, the
practice had in its possession a labyrinth.
mong the many palaces of
Paris, France, a country steeped
in grand, elaborate constructions,
the Bibliothèque Nationale de
France on the rue de Richelieu
is one for the books. A Beaux-
Arts beauty by architect Henri Labrouste,
this cathedral of French culture is the now
the grand-dame of a contemporary age,
courtesy of a Herculean overhaul from Paris-
based practice Bruno Gaudin Architectes.
One might assume that in the face of the
city's more lionized architectural prizes—
the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe,
Versailles—that the National Library of
France might not merit much notice. But
with all those decorative theatrics, this c'est
magnifique set piece leaves no confusion as
to where one might be. This is France.
And this, the National Library of France,
is history, with tentacles tracing back to
imperial times when a royal library was
54 DIGS.NET
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