The appearance of the National Library of France has a strong symbolic significance. These four open books, like the city's navigation marks, clearly define the location of the mythical and symbolic library in Paris. These four open books seem to be talking to distant readers, because for most people, their reading activities in the National Library of France began with reading these four famous books before entering this library. They saw these four books from a distance, so they recognized the French National Library and determined its position in the city.
When people approach it, the first thing they feel is confusion and surprise. When you come out of the Seine, you first climb the 52-step wooden floor, and then you come to a square. The wooden floor is as big as eight football fields. At the four corners of the square are four towering glass buildings. At this time, you have arrived at the National Library of France, with no walls and no gates. Standing here, you will feel much smaller. Looking down from the center of the wooden floor square, there is a green forest. Around this green forest is the reading room on the second floor, which is the lower half of the library. You need to take the open-air elevator to get down to this reading area, which can be regarded as the entrance to the reading area. You must be checked by security personnel before entering here.
After going deep into the reading area by elevator, people can get the best view. You can see the dense forest in the whole building complex, where adult pine trees, birch trees, oak trees and so on are planted from Normandy forest. This forest surrounded by the reading building creates an ideal reading environment. No one can enter this forest because it is separated from the glass of the reading room. Readers can see it, but they can't touch it. It seems to be artificial, out of reach, a mirage. Readers can't hear the swaying leaves, all of which reinforce another most amazing feature of this library building, that is, its high abstraction.
It created a quiet place in the noise of Paris. The forest is located under the wooden floor square, and the surrounding reading room seems to be out of town. Here, readers feel isolated, far from the original living environment, quiet, quiet, comfortable, pleasing to the eye, full of cultural atmosphere. It dispels the noise of the city and creates a good reading environment conducive to stimulating people's creative thinking. Further down is the researcher's reading room, which readers can only enter if they have reached a certain level of education. Here you can see the bottom of the forest, roots and soil, symbolizing the deposition of human culture. You can read cultural classics, memorize audio-visual images and conduct special research.
If the four open books, which are bright, transparent and towering, are pursuing its symbol, the navigation mark of the French National Library and strengthening its guidance, then they go deep into the lower part of the wooden floor square and underground to seek the long and endless cultural deposition symbolizing human beings, while the green forest at the center of this accumulation is pursuing abstraction and vacuum, thus ending the symbol of this building and making readers forget it. This is the connotation expressed by the architectural design of this library itself.
This library was designed by Dominique perrot, a brilliant young designer who was deeply appreciated by President Mitterrand. The architectural design, interior decoration and furniture configuration of the museum are all contracted by the same company, and advanced science and technology are adopted to achieve harmony inside and outside. The architectural design of the museum also reflects France's strong environmental awareness. Its earliest concept began with two leaves. There are no materials such as cement, tiles, lime, plastic, wallpaper, paint and coating from the outside to the inside. I can see four kinds of materials when I walk around this library: glass, metal, wood, red carpet, all walls, aluminum alloy or glass. The ground is all wood from outdoor to indoor, and most of the furniture is wood. Glass and metal materials give people a strong sense of modernity, while wood floors and forests make people return to nature. The exterior of these four buildings is made of glass. In order to protect books from the sun, a movable wooden wall was added to the glass. So when the sun shines, the building becomes wooden, and when the sun shines, it is bright and transparent. All the wood used for the wooden movable wall on the building surface is imported from Gabon, and all the wood used for the square and indoor wooden floor is imported from Brazil.
In the combination of indoor space, there are many places that use advanced breathable steel wire textile walls to make the air circulate and let people breathe with the outside world without looking at it.
Due to the extensive use of glass and toughened materials, a lot of reflected light is generated, but the cool colors reflected by these toughened walls seem to reflect each other with the warm colors reversed by the ubiquitous wood-colored materials and crimson carpets, thus realizing the light coordination of these materials.
Every piece of furniture and decoration in the museum is very elegant, well-made and unique in design. For example, the lamp post cover of the floor lamp in each reading room is made of metal hoses used by expensive aerial tankers, which looks very chic.
The four glass buildings in the library are stacks, which are connected by glass corridors from the bottom. Inside the corridor is a spacious and bright reading room. You can see the green forest from the glass corridor from every reading room. Under the instruction of the computer, the library will deliver the books in the stacks to the readers through dozens of 8-kilometer tracks within 10 minutes.
The interior of this magnificent library is criss-crossed without gates and walls. Because of the large building, it is normal for the staff not to know. According to the staff, the library has 5,600 doors and17,000 keys, and four full-time staff manage these keys, setting a record for the library. Therefore, it is the giant of the library. But this giant is worth having.
Books in the National Library of France are not lent out, only for reading or copying. You have to pay for reading in the library. Tickets are divided into two-day cards (30 francs), two weekly cards (200 francs) and one-year cards (300 francs), but college students, unemployed people and people enjoying social assistance enjoy half price. Our staff and retirees, librarians of other libraries, students of French Literature Institute and French National Institute of Library and Information Science are all free of charge (so I take advantage of this convenient condition to visit the National Library every time I go to Paris).
Foreigners coming to France and visiting the National Library are also tourist projects in Paris. The National Library of France provides special guided tours. The tour fee is 45 francs and the time is one and a half hours.