Architecture for Reading in Public

An in-depth look at the iconic mid-nineteenth-century building and its construction during a period of revolution and its transformative impact on the history of architecture Since its completion in 1850, the Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive has been heralded as a major forerunner of modern architecture. The architect Henri Labrouste, a product of the cole des Beaux-Arts, broke with the reigning neoclassical tradition by expressing on the exterior the buildings internal functions and exposing on the interior the unprecedented iron construction of its reading room. Underlying these radical departures from tradition was a new democratic form of spatial organization appropriate to the new reading public. Acclaimed architectural historian Neil Levine presents both a building historydiscussing the significance of the program, site, prehistory, and building processand a window into a period of momentous historical change by contextualizing Labroustes work within the revolutionary times of the latter part of the July Monarchy and Second Republic in France. He examines how the building communicates a public purpose through its anticlassical, nonhierarchic, egalitarian form and reveals how the Bibliothque Sainte-Genevive is the product of a poetic architectural intelligence mixed with radical, democratic ideals.