Dominique Perrault

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/21/opinion/sunday/dominique-perrault.html

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Dominique Perrault is a French architect respected for his minimalist sensibility and projects that comfortably meld environment, culture and utility. He is perhaps best known for an expansion of the National Library of France and the newly completed extension to the Pavillon Dufour at the Palace of Versailles.

READING I read Patrick Modiano to get lost in time and Paris’s space: “Rue des boutiques obscures,” “Dora Bruder,” “La Place de l’étoile.” In his books, there is a relationship between the psychology of the characters and the specificity of the place. For an architect, it is very emotional. It’s like walking down a promenade and the feeling about the open space, or maybe it’s a dark street, small and narrow, in Paris. And sometimes nothing happens but you follow the characters as they move through Paris and feel what they are feeling.

Also Joris-Karl Huysmans’ “A rebours.” It’s a very important book because it is a break for him to write about another vision of reality. It was written at the end of 19th century but it is very modern. It’s about all the information we have about the world around us, but the most important world is the world we have inside, our own personal opinions.

LISTENING Regarding music, I only listen to female voices. I suppose because I am a man. For opera as well as a cappella, I like Teresa Berganza, Renée Fleming or Kathleen Ferrier. I also listen to jazz, Aretha Franklin or Dianne Reeves, and finally to the fabulous voice of French music: Barbara. I don’t know if Barbara has a real great voice, but she pushes her voice to the limit of her capacity and she’s taking a bigger risk because she writes and performs her own music so it’s more personal. Not like an opera.

WATCHING I only watch movies I can stream. With streaming it’s possible to start with a movie and stop and go faster and return. It’s under your control. It’s like a book. The last two movies I watched were “Le Samouraï” from Jean-Pierre Melville and “Still Walking” from Hirokazu Koreeda. Both are minimalist, but the first is minimalist with the quality of the light and the movement, and the second is minimalist with the drama and yet a very strong psychological situation appears.

FOLLOWING I follow design and architecture blogs such as Designboom or Dezeen and the design galleries Patrick Seguin and Kreo. I follow socialistmodernism.com, which is a website that focuses on the preservation of 20th-century brutalism architecture. And I am also fascinated — like a lot of French people — by President Obama, and I follow him through the White House photographer Pete Souza.

DIGGING I am interested in the Lowline, an underground park being built in New York. We spend a lot of money on infrastructure underground, O.K., but we should also dig to develop facilities and connections between buildings in the basement. The idea is to increase density of a city without building more above ground. We should protect the voids we have left on the surface.