Dominique Perrault

He established his studio in 1981 in Paris, after having studied architecture, urban planning and history. Ever since, he has accrued a long history of professional successes, based on the concept of involution developed by the School of Engineering at Marne-la-Vallée or when he designed the Industrial Berlier Building.

Other works that mark the this winner of with the National Prize for Architecture are the National Library in France, the Mediatheque in Vénissieux, the APLIX factory and the Olympic Swimming-pool and Velodrome in Berlin.

Perrault meets the sensitivity of American minimalist artists, such as Donald Judd, and representatives of Land Art, such as Robert Smithson, who always opt for simple solutions. In his works he aims at combining transparency, luminosity and the dematerialisation of architecture.

Dominique Perrault Architecture [www]

 

Proposta para a Cidade da Cultura

 

Perrault proposes to build an entire landscape, a forest, a mountain… it is to build the Mountain of Culture. The whole complex issues from the prism of light, in the shape of a building provided with certain flexibility to make a rotation of uses feasible.

One single, underground building is distributed into different halls, large spaces at different levels, to host the diverse functions required by the project. At ground level a long glass prism juts out of Mount Gaiás that allows to diffuse, reflect and transmit light entering the building carved into the mountaintop. The intention is to direct the light into the depths of the earth through this optical instrument.