Lighting up architecture: The brilliant legacy of Henri Labrouste

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Victoria Keller visits an illuminating exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art

You may never have heard of the architect Henri Labrouste (French, 1801–75), I certainly hadn't, but his influence on 19th- and 20th-century architects and the way civic space, and that of libraries in particular, is conceived has been enormous.  He is what they call ‘an architect's architect’ in the way that Picasso is often referred to as an ‘artist's artist’, meaning that the intricacies of his work are often best appreciated by fellow craftsmen.  'Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light', on view at MoMA, New York until 24 June, and its accompanying publication are designed to reach a wider audience.

Two Parisian libraries are the main focus of this exhibition, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (1838–50) and the Bibliothèque nationale (1859–75).  But before you get to them you pass through the exhibition's first room, a long narrow corridor hung with work made early in Labrouste's career, from 1818 to 1838. Much of this was made during the five years he spent at the French Academy in Rome in the late 1820s  (see the images of his  Imaginary Ancient City  and  Etruscan Tomb  on the carousel above). There are beautiful, measured drawings and studies of ancient monuments and Etruscan tombs that had been discovered only a few years earlier. 

This corridor dramatically opens into the part of the exhibition devoted to Labrouste's principal works as a public architect in the period of the great urban transformation of Paris in the mid-19th century.   His work on the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and the restoration and extension of the Bibliothèque national de France are marked by the abundant use of industrial materials such as iron and cast iron, the quality of their internal spaces, and the use of gas lighting, which made the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève the first library that could admit readers in the evening.  These were revolutionary buildings for their time.

The room is dominated by large wooden drawing tables you might find in an architect's office, with  Labrouste's measured project drawings and plans mounted on them, instead of hung on the walls.  You look at them as an architect or town planner might have seen them.  It works well.  There is also a digital reconstruction showing the Sainte-Geneviève reading room from day to night:  the large windows made possible by the airiness of the construction let in much daylight, but as night drew in the new gas lights came on, making this public space accessible for much longer hours than had been previously possible.

Labrouste used the solutions he developed with the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève when he came to work on the  restoration and extension of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.  Again, he created elegant combinations of iron, cast iron and light, used here to create a soaring space with nine square domed bays crowned by ceramic vaults held aloft by four slim 33-foot-high columns, illustrating the dazzling possibilities of iron construction.

The Bibliothèque nationale is a copyright library, meaning that every book published in France is to be lodged there.  When Labrouste took on the commission to restore the library, he knew that the library was always going to grow.  While the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève had open stacks in the reading room Labrouste designed his second library differently.

Although the reading room had some ornamentation, the great central book stacks, visible through a huge archway, were entirely conceived in functionalist iron expression: the superstructure of the stacks, sky-lit from above, the shelves, walkways and staircases, all pierced so that natural light could penetrate through five levels of book storage.  There was even a pneumatic tube system for book delivery.

The exhibition documents these two designs through beautiful drawings of many stages of construction, from the cutting of the masonry, to the ornamentation of the iron members of the vaults, to the handling of the bookcases and the purpose-designed furniture for the rooms.   There are also analytical models, historical photographs and modern large-scale projections of the two reading rooms.

The exhibition's final section looks at Labrouste's extensive influence on his peers and subsequent generations of architects.  In  ‘Louis I. Kahn and the Ruins of Rome’ (MoMA's  Quarterly, Summer 1992: 1–13), referring to Kahn's Yale Center for British Art, Vincent Scully wrote:

Here, in his analysis of how to use classicism, and how to make a modern building fronting a street, it is as if Kahn jumped almost a hundred years, from Piranesi in 1745 to Henri Labrouste's Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève of 1843–50 in Paris, which is unquestionably the most copied building of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Labrouste's students worked throughout France and there is a focus on several of them and their buildings, such as Julien Guadet (1834-1908) and his Parisian Post Office (the Guadet Post Office).  Labrouste's influence is also shown in the development of metal architecture, which was very much in the air at the time in many countries and the exhibition finishes up with designs of public and commercial buildings around the world that are indebted to Labrouste's concepts. 

Labrouste's two libraries, with their rational handling of space used for a civic purpose, powerfully yet elegantly expressed through modern materials such as cast iron, were recognized as   important in their own day.  This exhibition and its accompanying publication bring  Labrouste to light for us today.

Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light,  edited by  Barry Bergdollis published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013. Hardback 232pp, 225 colour illus, $55.00. Outside the USA and Canada available through Thames & Hudson. ISBN 9780870708398