Precedent: National library of France, Paris /architect: Dominique Perrault
	S o c i a l A r c h i t e c t u r e
	Introduction: Perrault describes his design as creating “A library for France, a square for Paris.” This project appalled many academics by the thought of storing the nation’s cultural treasure in four 60’s style modern glass towers, and they criticized the scale of project as not human scale library. Regardless of surmount antithetical critiques, the project was chosen to be built by Mitterrand.
	Analysis: The core idea is to emblematize four giant open books facing each other across a vast rectangular garden plazas enclosed by their forms. This approach is partly, I suspect, premised on semiotics on purpose of integrating meaning with architectural forms; however, conveying the right signification by architectural forms is not sound since it generalizes various mental perceptions of people into one identity as people.
	Perrault’s first intension for the skin of four towers was ultraviolet resistant glass to filter out sunlight from the towers and to make opaque skin, but it was dropped, and replaced by wooden shutters. Now books in the four giant glass books are shaded by wooden shutters making the open book form of architecture porously opaque rather than transparent. These wooden shutters screen out sunlight but in turn create complex dialogues between transparency and opaque. This blurs the boundaries between internal and external space by transforming into a transitional identity. Wooden esplanade warms interior tones and above all, the sunken inlaid garden at the kernel of the project; however, protected inlaid courtyard doesn’t really create diverse activities of public, and four giant towers are somewhat too imposing to encourage casual interactive atmosphere. Perrault said minimalist art of Donald Judd is as great as that of modernist architects like Kahn or Corbusier. As such, this project is architecture of minimalist which looks for simple but complex solution like an abstract piece of modern art. Interplay between glass, metallic fabric, raw concrete and wood gives vitality to the simple geometry of the building.
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