Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Rising up from the banks of the Seine are the four glass towers of the controversial, €2 billion National Library of France, conceived by the late president François Mitterrand as a ‘wonder of the modern world’ and opened in 1988.

No expense was spared to carry out a plan that many said defied logic. While many of the books and historical documents were shelved in the sun-drenched, 23-storey, 79m-high towers – shaped like half-open books – readers sat in artificially lit basement halls built around a light well ‘courtyard’ of 140 50-year-old pines, trucked in from the countryside. The towers have since been fitted with a complex (and expensive) shutter system, but the basement is prone to flooding from the Seine. The national library contains around 12 million tomes stored on some 420km of shelves and can accommodate 2000 readers and 2000 researchers. Temporary exhibitions (use Entrance E) revolve around ‘the word’, focusing on everything from storytelling to bookbinding.