A Browse Through France’s Novel Libraries

Hazel Smith takes a look at some of France’s spectacularly novel libraries…

France has many iconic libraries – the Bibliothèque Mazarine is the oldest, the Richelieu Library possibly the most beautiful… But not all French libraries are steeped in architectural tradition: some are astonishing examples of contemporary design, art installations designed not only to awe you, but to draw you in. La Tête Carrée (The Square Head) in Nice, for example, is a sublime and daunting balancing act of a cube 30m tall, poised atop a sculptural chin and a pair of shoulders. It was designed by French sculptor Sacha Sosno, who originally named his work ‘Thinking Inside the Box’. Today this landmark is the administrative head of Nice’s massive Bibliothèque Louis Nucéra.

Use your head

When the audacious Tête Carrée was completed in 2002, it became the world’s first inhabited monumental sculpture. The seven floors in its neck and head contain enough space for 40 people to work. Monochrome by day, the head lights up from within at night making La Tête Carrée, which is visible from the corner of Traverse Barla and Avenue Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a spectacle both day and night.

In Thionville, in the northeastern department of Moselle near the border with Luxembourg, is Puzzle, a media library where other borders are reimagined. Puzzle is aptly named, as from above, this médiathèque, at 1 place Malraux, resembles a wonky, free-form jigsaw piece. Its façade undulates like an unfurling ribbon, creating an ambiguity between the inside and outside space. Found within its loops and curlicues is a fluid world where the traditional boundaries between the fields of art, music and literature are erased. Artistic spheres coexist and contrasts become an asset. Within this labyrinth exist different ‘universes’; intimate cocoons and creative group studios, where regular users create their own personal mental maps.

Since its opening in 2016, Puzzle, which was designed by Dominique Coulon & Associés, has been dubbed a third space neither home nor workplace, but a modern day meeting place of culture, where patrons can check in, as well as checking out library material.

A bookish legacy

At the other end of the country in Aix-en-Provence, three giant books form the entrance of the city’s impressive Bibliothèque Méjanes. Visitors, reduced to Lilliputian size, are welcomed inside through oversized editions of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, Le Malade Imaginaire by Molière and Albert Camus’ l’Etranger. The library came about thanks to the Marquess of Méjanes, an 18th-century aristocrat who was no stranger to the written word and who, on his death in 1786, donated 80,000 of his books to the town. Two hundred years later in 1989, the architectural firm Deslandes-Gosmini brilliantly relocated the Bibliothèque Méjanes from Aix’s town hall into an abandoned match factory, an early example of adapting and reusing a disused industrial space. Well-used for three decades, the Bibliothèque Méjanes was overdue a refit. The vast books found off 8-10 rue des Allumettes will be carefully preserved as part of the renovation which is being carried out by Aix-based Panorama Architecture, marking a new chapter for this iconic library.

From France Today Magazine