In The Tube
100-500 Wall

Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost & Dominique Perrault

In 2008, the architect Dominique Perrault described himself in eleven words. School. Rupture. Defiance. Void. Wall. Earth. Land art. Site. Place. Happiness. Mesh. A flexible material endowed with structure, whose quality is to be and not to be. A rigorous and poetic material, immaterial and constructed, which the architect has seized upon to create protective or welcoming geographies, manage public or private spaces, and shape natural and artificial light.

It is this mesh that Dominique Perrault and Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost captured, manipulated, shaped, introduced, and sometimes grafted onto the very interiors of the lighting fixtures to create the thousands of original and powerful devices that illuminate the National Library of France day and night. The protagonist of a moral tale and a social contract, each chapter and clause of which he boldly, intelligently, and pragmatically writes, Dominique Perrault is the architect of form, meaning, dynamics, knowledge, energy—in short, of context. His creations explore all its facets.