In Fine
1600 Wall

Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost & Dominique Perrault

In 2008, architect Dominique Perrault summed himself up in eleven words: School. Rupture. Distrust. Void. Wall. Earth. Land art. Site. Place. Happiness. Mesh. A flexible material endowed with structure, whose quality lies in both being and not being.

A rigorous and poetic material, both immaterial and constructed, which the architect has embraced to create protective or welcoming geographies, manage public or private spaces, and shape both natural and artificial light.

It is this mesh that Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost & Dominique Perrault captured, manipulated, shaped, introduced and sometimes grafted into the very heart of lighting fixtures to create the thousands of original and powerful devices that illuminate the Bibliothèque Nationale de France by day and by night. A protagonist in a moral tale and a social contract, for which he writes every chapter and every clause with boldness, intelligence and pragmatism, Dominique Perrault is the architect of form, meaning, dynamics, knowledge, energy—in short, of context. His work questions every one of these aspects.