Biblio Ste Genevieve
From Archiplanet
 | Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve |
| Designer | Henri Labrouste |
| Location | Paris, France |
| Date | 1843 designed, built 1845 to 1851 |
| Building Type | library |
| Climate | temperate |
| Context | urban |
| Architectural Style | Italian Renaissance Revival |
| Street Address | |
| Notes | Monumental long vaulted reading room. Iron arches and columns support roof independently of masonry walls. |
| At Great Buildings | http://www.GreatBuildings.com/buildings/Biblio_Ste_Genevieve.html |
Contents |
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Commentary
"One of the greatest cultural buildings of the nineteenth century to use iron in a prominent, visible way was unquestionably the Bibliotheque Ste.-Genevieve in Paris, designed by Henri Labrouste and built in 1842-50. The large (278 by 69 feet) two-storied structure filling a wide, shallow site is deceptively simple in scheme: the lower floor is occupied by stacks to the left, rare-book storage and office space to the right, with a central vestibule and stairway leading to the reading room which fills the entire upper story. The ferrous structure of this reading room—a spine of slender, cast-iron Ionic columns dividing the space into twin aisles and supporting openwork iron arches that carry barrel vaults of plaster reinforced by iron mesh—has always been revered by Modernists for its introduction of high technology into a monumental building."
— Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p478.
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[edit] References
Micheal Brawne. Libraries: Architecture and Equipment . New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970. LC 73-089609. Z679.B83. Interior photo of main space, f19, p18.
Roger H. Clark and Michael Pause. Precedents in Architecture . New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1985. grid geometry diagram, p194.— Updated edition available at Amazon.com
Sir Banister Fletcher. A History of Architecture. London: The Butterworth Group, 1987. ISBN 0-408-01587-X. LC 86-31761. NA200.F63 1987. mentioned, p1190, p1191. — The classic text of architectural history. Expanded 1996 edition available at Amazon.com
Johnson Architectural Images. Copyrighted slides in the Artifice Collection.
Robert Middleton and David Watkin. Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture/2 . New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1980. NA600.M513. ISBN 0-8478-0851-3. plan, p233. section, p233.
John Julius Norwich, ed. Great Architecture of the World . London: Mitchell Beazley Publishers, 1975. interior photo, cutaway axonometric, p208.— An accessible, inspiring and informative overview of world architecture, with lots of full-color cutaway drawings, and clear explanations. Available at Amazon.com
Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture, from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986. ISBN 0-13-044702-1. NA200.T7. discussion p478.— Available at Amazon.com
