Overview

Dominique Perrault Architecture

Exhibition at the Pompidou Center, Paris France June 11 2008 - September 29 2008

Curator: Frédéric Migayrou

The Centre Pompidou staged the first ever large-scale exhibition devoted to the work of French architect Dominique Perrault. Dominique Perrault's, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the unique East Paris landmark, can be described as 'non-architecture' because it transforms the building into a volume around a garden. Today, Perrault's design is recognised as having 'inaugurated a new logic of the architectural object and its environment'. The exhibition introduced the public to Perrault's work in a selection of fifty projects. It presented a body of work that cannot be reduced to one single building, 'however emblematic it might be'. Instead it provided evidence of the continuous interrogation in forms of expression in Perrault's designs, and was organised so that visitors moved along metal mesh screens that are key features in Perrault's architecture and which he says: 'These aren't authoritative, impenetrable, separating walls. What they do is create permeability, interrelationship. So from the beginning there's an abolition of enclosure in favour of transition, motion.'

An English-language exhibition catalogue, co-written with Luis Fernancez-Galiano, and published by TF Editores, is now available.

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Frédéric Migayrou
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