Book: The construction of Merveilles.
The Tres Grande Bibliotheque de France (TGB, 1989), the ideology of its two fundamental parts:
.01 The stacks (layering of floors)
.02 the reading rooms (voids cut into the layering)
Low volumes are generated for the conference center, exhibitions, reception, storage and technical spaces which are conceived as autonomous parts of the program. These volumes are contained in a long, tall, colossal prism of a library, with a quadrangular plan (75x87m).
Structure:
In the lower levels, towards the Seine, a heonidovian structural trellis is inserted that permits elimination of any other vertical support. The upper load bearing structure is composed of five long walls that subdivide the plan into parallel bands. The walls are made of reinforced concrete, 2m thick, calculated to prevent fires and equipped wit inter spaces for conducts and technical equipment.
"giant deep beams define a self sufficient structural system"
Nine elevator groups, enclosed in 'glass cages', are inserted in the pattern of the walls. The walls and floor slabs are cut to interlock the reading rooms. These spaces are not crossed by structural elements and are larger than the spaces in-between the floor stacks.
The stratification of obtaining large spaces in floor stacks dates back, in the cae of OMA's work, to the bodies inserted in the Sphinx, the statue of liberty inside the Chrysler Building in Dream of Liberty, the spherical council set into the City Hall of the Hague.
The reading rooms are enclosed in shells and mimic forms of pebbles.. randomly arranged on the lower levels, (auditorium and projection booths), of a "cross" between different volumes (current event library), of a "spiral" (study library on three large ramps), of a "shell" (catalogue room) and of a "loop" based on the Moebius strip, (research library).
The extremities of the rooms are cut by the glass enclosures, which thus become one of the vertical section of the prism.
Facade:
With the exception of the facade of the offices.. perforated by windows, the others are decorated with cloud morfits, translating the idea of series of cavities created inside a "nebulous mass" into imagery. If we imagined it with pebbles.. "this nebulous mass" might also been seen as the spatial sublimation of the blue monochromes painted by Klein, starting with the one entitles RE19 in 1958, where he applied sponges of different sizes on the canvas, randomly arranged and soaked with the same colour, almost as if they were clouds.
The objective of the design process was to discover the degree of freedom permitted by such grand structural system.
"we simply assume that the weight of the TCB will be supported by columns in a regular grid. The disadvantage is that void spaces would be skewered. Also in the lower levels, the columns would get horribly fat. The entrance level would be stunning, however not very efficient. Nobody would know where to go, and it would be impossible to excavate larger spaces below for the auditorium".
OMA considered the possibility of eliminating the pillars, transforming the enclosure of the rooms into structural "carapaces" to support the slabs. Nevertheless, the position of the rooms was limited by the distribution of the load. The path indicated in this latter solution is more difficult and complex for the calculation of the structures and the economics of their construction.
According to the OMA narrative, this is the point in the project in which Vierendeel Beams was introduced, with the height of one floor (as in the ZKM). The Vierendeel Beams are used in different configuration, resting upright, creating an alternation between floors that correspond to the height of the beams and floors sandwiched between two beams. The beam makes it hard to insert the rooms in the structure.
The various solutions examined thus far in the project were all discharged due to the persistence of the original idea, contained in the sketch for the ZKM, of large rooms with irregular configurations set into the regular volume of the building.
To obtain this specific relationship within the library, a solution was developed by rejoining the beam to achieve a single continuos vertical structure that could be freely cut to permit insertions of the rooms.
The starting point of this solution was the Vierendeel beam, the structural model most similar to this beam wall is the reinforced concrete wall freely cut to adapt the layout requirements, a wide spread construction solution by now.
"now the plan - OMA continues - is divided into parallel zones 12.5 meters each, separating by walls of concrete. The walls are 100m high and act as a deep beam of theoretically infinite strength. Where the voids occur, they simply punch out holes in the beams. In the Great Hall of Ascension, the beams are supported on two opposite sides to create a column-free square of 70x70m. So the walls are made hollow and are subdivided into vertical shafts. To service the 12.5 meter in-between, they merely have to be punctured. The void spaces each have their own plant rooms: five technological placentas"
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A series of plans and sections proposed by OMA features venturian poche fields to bring out the idea of the reading rooms hollowed out inside a sort of boulder.
One of the two models represents only the rooms, the service spaces and the elevators in solid form. The other shows the complex of the stack in the form of a mass perforated by the cavities of the room.
"The library is interpreted as a solid block of information, a repository of all forms of memory, books, optic disks, microfiches, computers..etc. In this block, the major public spaces are defined as absence of building, void carried out from information solid"
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