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.
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