New Forms Taschen 118

the modern purist tenants, and he may be right about that. In any case, through massive intervention of the French government, a new place of intellectual gather-ing has been created in Paris.

Another urban symbol of significance is the new Phoenix Public Library designed by Will Bruder. This structure is intended to serve as the central library of Phoenix, Arizona, until at least 2040, and presently contains over one million volumes. No less than 40,000 kg of ribbed copper cladding cover the exterior of this 26,000 m² library, especially on the east and west facades. The Southern elevation is entirely glass covered. Inside, the ground f loor combines current fiction, audio, video, com-puting, a children's reading room, a theater, and a cafć. The library's services are spread on five floors with copper-clad mechanical and service "saddlebags,"which protect the interior from the extremely hot desert sun. The most speaacular interior space is the fifth-floor 4,000 m² reading room, housing the entire collection of circulating non-fiction books. Arrival to this "great room' is via glass elevators or a grand sculptural staircase of Steel, concrete and translucent glass. At the center of the building, there is a five-story atrium/light well, which Bruder has dubbed the "Crystal Canyon'. As this name makes elear, the architect intends this building to have a dose relationship to geology. Born in 1946, Will Bruder was self-trained as an architect, but his early apprenticeship under Paolo Soleri and Gunnar Birkerts gives some hint of what he calls his 'pursuit of 'architecture as art' married to a hands-on sense of reality." As in the case of Predock's Laramie building, copper is an important element in the cladding of the new Phoenix structure, but here the scalę is larger. Bruder's own description of the building makes elear his intentions: 'Arizona's natural beauty provides the poetic metaphor for the library's image. A majestic mesa transplanted from the fantastic landscape of Arizona's Monument Valley... The building's exterior appearance is original rather than traditional, rather like a geological landform or abstract minimalist sculpture.' Both Bruder's reference to "architecture as art' and this last comparison to "abstract minimalist sculpture" relate his work to the trends already demonstrated for architects as dif-ferent as Frank O. Gehry and Steven Holi. Corning from the Southwest, where urban growth has been strong and the remarkable landscape is never far removed, Bruder, like Predock, calls on a morę distant past than any architectural tradition. This search goes back even farther than the "primitivist" exploration of the early mod-

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