In The Tube
360 400 Wall

Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost & Dominique Perrault

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

A material that is at once rigorous and poetic, immaterial yet constructed, which the architect has embraced to create protective and welcoming landscapes, shape public and private spaces, and sculpt both natural and artificial light.

It is this mesh that Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost and Dominique Perrault have captured, manipulated, shaped, introduced and, at times, integrated into the very heart of lighting fixtures, creating the thousands of innovative and powerful lighting elements that illuminate the Bibliothèque nationale de France by day and by night.

The central figure of a moral tale and a social contract, whose every chapter and every clause he writes with audacity, intelligence and pragmatism, Dominique Perrault is an architect of form, meaning, movement, knowledge, energy—in short, of context. His work questions every one of these dimensions.