Where Form Trumps Function Le Monde Headquarters in Paris
- Andrew Ayers
It all began with a televised presidential appearance: on 14 July 1988, in his Bastille Day broadcast, François Mitterrand announced his intention to build a new national library – what would become Dominique Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France – after which Jacques Chirac, mayor of the French capital, rushed to offer a site on former goods sidings behind the Gare d’Austerlitz. For Perrault’s library, it turned out, it was the first brick in a mammoth operation to convert 130 track-filled hectares into a brand-new neighbourhood of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. Three decades on, a small piece of this still-incomplete puzzle was unveiled last year with the opening of new premises for media group Le Monde. Located just behind the Gare d’Austerlitz, on the avenue Pierre-Mendès-France – part of the new neighbourhood’s spinal artery, which spans the railway tracks all the way to the city limits – the 23,000-square-metre building was designed by Norwegian architects Snøhetta, and realized in partnership with French practice SRA.
