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Science lesson: veiled in a polycarbonate skin, this science library exploits site, light and materials in the quiet pursuit of passive environmental control

Architectural Review, The, July, 2005

The young French partnership of Florence Lipsky and Pascal Rollet has a reputation for formally sparse but technically and materially inventive buildings that make the most of limited programmes and budgets. Though the pair favour the aesthetic edginess and functional economy of raw or industrial materials, they generally play it straight with modular Miesian structures and disciplined spatial arrangements. Their latest building is a science library for the University of Orleans. Founded in 1961 and now with some 5000 students, the university occupies a peripheral campus sward at some remove from the city centre, linked by a tram line that runs on a north-south axis across town. The site for the library is next to the tram line, in front of one of the four stations that serves the campus.

Emerging from a boskily pastoral setting, the building is a strong, almost graphic presence in the landscape. The taut orthogonality of its form, a long, three-storey box terminated by a full-height colonnade, suggests a scientific triumph of the rational over the romantic, but it has a more quixotic side in its appropriation of materials, handling of light and approach to energy use and environmental control.

The tall concrete colonnade, like a scaled down version of Foster's Carre d'Art museum, Nimes (AR July 1993), is a welcoming gesture that celebrates and civilises arrival, while emphasising a route to the lake. A small glass box, which also acts as an informal exhibition space, forms a decompression zone between the blare of the outside world and the silent inner sanctum of the reading room. Areas of clear glazing are punched apparently at random into the translucent polycarbonate skin frame and define views of the landscape from inside at study table height, so students can drift off in contemplative reveries.

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In operational terms, the modern university library is less concerned with the inducement of reverie and more with the efficient storage and retrieval of information, in both paper and digital formats. Yet the process of information withdrawal, consultation and return continues to underpin and structure the library as a building type. Lipksy Rollet articulate this process through a central 'book box', a dense core of books surrounded by more fluid study zones arranged round the periphery. The main reading room is a dramatic triple-height space, overlooked and surveyed by perimeter study zones on the floor above, so users can inhabit a more intimate enclave, yet be aware of wider goings on.

The monumental book box is clad in Fincof panels (more commonly employed for concrete formwork), a type of Finnish birch plywood stained with dark phenolic resin. The panels evoke the warm leather of traditional bookbinding and study armchairs but this is faux luxury. The budget necessitated an imaginatively frugal approach to materials, as manifest by the double skin of polycarbonate used to clad the building which combines good insulation levels with light diffusing qualities, so the reading room seems wrapped in a rice paper screen, with readers silhouetted against its translucent walls. South and east facades have vertical, manually operable white polycarbonate louvres to provide additional glare control. Depending on the sun angle and building users, the vertical brise soleil create a changing pattern on the facades.

Though France is not as advanced as Germany in legislating for efficient energy use, the need to keep capital and running costs down proved an important incentive, giving rise to an integrated system of low key, passive environmental control techniques that minimise mechanical systems. The building is naturally ventilated, with fresh air warming and rising up through the main reading room through the stack effect and expelled through vents in the roof. In winter, the main gas-fired heating system of water pipes in the ground floor slab is supplemented by a network of local radiators for smaller cellular spaces. All this is achieved in an undemonstrative yet thoughtful way that chimes with the wider architectural intentions. Without succumbing entirely to the lure of scientific rationalism, Lipsky Rollet manage to make complex things look elegantly simple and obvious. This is science with soul. C.S.

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