—John Patkau, Co-designer, Grande Bibliothèque du Quebec

I find myself agreeing with both ends of Vancouver architect John Patkau’s assessment. Architectural culture generally, and we architecture critics specifically, have over-published and over-praised art galleries over the past decade or two. The “Bilbao Effect” has become bilious, and I, for one, will be quite happy if I never again hear mock-sculptural, self-conscious halls for contemporary art referred to as “the new cathedrals.”

It seems just as evident to me that the building that will come to emblemize the beginning of a new century of public architecture is not the latest kunsthalle by Hadid, Holl or Herzog, but rather Rem Koolhaas’ Seattle Central Public Library. As Patkau suggests, the library—especially the North American public lending library—is a particularly populist building type in that it uniquely serves all classes, ages and education levels. The Seattle building fulfills most of its library functions admirably; but it is trailblazing for its take on public space, and through this, the idea of public architecture it presents. Within its zig-zag shell, Koolhaas’ library proposes a range of public spaces that hilly, jammed-out downtown Seattle never got around to building. Its various levels provide niches for scholars, corporate researchers, bibliomanes, teen-daters and even the homeless seeking refuge from the rain.

Despite chambers of commerce getting on the Bilbao bandwagon, art galleries are seldom “civic” in this sense. One way or another they are zones of contemplation, a key reason galleries are handed out to assertive form-makers like Frank Gehry, those pre-disposed to metaphysical claims like Daniel Libeskind, or architects pumping cyber-methods to inflate a favoured range of organic forms, like Asymtote. We over-value all three firms today, and my sense is that under the new rigours of expensive energy and more intensive city-building, their works will soon come to be seen as a kind of “Aestheticism Nouveau,” the architecture of the 1990s emerging as eerily similar to that of the 1890s. It is telling that a more recent round of gallery commissions have gone to safely buttoned-down Neo-Modernists like Tanaguchi at MOMA, Brad Cloepfil’s Allied Works Architecture (the renewed Seattle Art Museum, New York’s Huntington Hartford Museum and others), and Herzog and de Meuron (San Francisco’s De Young Museum and others).

Qua architecture not sculpture, libraries are more interesting places than galleries not only because of the broader range of people who use them (Patkau’s point), but because they are places of work, especially mental work, which is what most of us do these days, and we hanker after public spaces to enrich the task.

The recent round of North American mega-libraries—which include John and Patricia Patkau’s Montreal bibliothèque, reviewed here—were strongly promoted by the business class in their respective cities. It seems collections of paper have proven surprisingly useful to knowledge-based businesses, despite—some say because of—the newfound ease of access to electronic information. The boosters, who insisted previously that even the smallest North American city build their own convention centre, have now turned to lobbying for major libraries.

The Montreal library is the most important North American mega-library to open to the public since Seattle. An island of seven million francophones isolated within a North American sea of 330 million anglophones, Quebec’s language politics have always been acute. The Grande Bibliothèque du Quebec is an emblem of the success of public policies devised in recent decades to protect the use of French there—the building is both a repository for the province’s literary history and a dynamic hub for its contemporary culture. Designed by Vancouver’s John and Patricia Patkau, it is also public architecture and city-building of the first order. With its combination of research library, rare books collection, children’s zone, multiple public reading rooms, multi-media holdings, gallery and theatre, the sheer size and range of functions arrayed within the Grande Bibliothèque place it firmly in the architectural line of recent North American downtown libraries. While most of its holdings may be in French, its sister designs are to be found in Phoenix (Wil Bruder) and Seattle (Koolhaas); not the Parisian tradition from Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Ste. Genevieve through Piano and Rogers’ Pompidou Centre (containing, amazingly, France’s first public lending library) to Dominique Perrault’s Bibliothèque nationale.

Like her contemporary, Mavis Gallant, Anne Hébert was a Quebec writer who spent much of her career in Paris. A lyrical novel she wrote there—Les chambres de bois—served as an initial source of inspiration to the Patkau’s design team. Their GBQ concept is predicated on two louvered “wooden rooms” contained within a similarly louvered glass box, nearly filling an entire super-block, assembled between bohemian rue St. Denis, an ungainly university pavilion and the inter-city bus station, all of these set over a major Métro connection point.

According to Patkau associate designer Michael Cunningham, early designs proposed pale-green oxidized copper shingles as cladding—alluding to Montreal church towers and “chateau chapeaux” in that material—but for cost reasons this was changed to the glass louvers in the same colour, most likely a better foil to surrounding brick buildings than the metal sheets would have been. Certainly, the scale and textures of the coloured glass and wooden interior constructions resonate against the blunter concrete structure, the GBQ having an unusual—and welcome—clarity of construction.

Library patrons rise up from the Métro station or enter from a recessed corner entrance to encounter the first and largest of the two “wooden rooms” that wrap the main library stacks. A sequence of quite differing reading rooms and carrel spaces are arrayed along the GBQ’s main pedestrian path, as it moves up and around all sides of these slatted wooden walls, providing readers a wide variety of light, view and privacy conditions. These spatial decisions are inverted for the second and smaller “wooden room” that is home to La collection québecoise’s literary documents and rare books. Here a skylit reading room demurs serenely at centre, surrounded by stacks in the 19th-century manner. This dynamic balance of introverted and extroverted reader’s spaces is an apt architectural metaphor for Montreal and contemporary Quebec, where enduring local traditions have now come to co-exist comfortably with the finessing of global economic and technological forces.

Quebec is doing more to fund and promote architectural competitions than anyplace else in the New World, and the GBQ design was selected by a well-run design contest, one where Zaha Hadid placed second. “Libraries are not really about sculptural form in the city,” says John Patkau of both his scheme, and Koolhaas’ Seattle design. Patkau points out that their building has almost the identical size and features as the Seattle library but, at just under US $50 million for the library and US $7 million for a related parking garage, it was built for one third the cost: “We were obliged to find poetics in our pragmatics.”

The 40,000-square-metre GBQ is the largest building completed to date by the Patkaus, Canada’s most acclaimed contemporary architects—known for their sublime houses, spatially rich schools and quietly assertive pavilions for art and universities. GBQ, however, is almost the size of all their previous buildings combined and, more importantly, demonstrates definitively that their subtle detailing and dialogue with context is not bound solely to suburban and rural sites. Grand it is.