Dominique Perrault

The Centre Pompidou is to stage the first ever large-scale exhibition devoted to the work of French architect Dominique Perrault. With this, having earlier paid tribute to Christian de Portzamparc (1996), Renzo Piano (2000), Jean Nouvel (2001), Thom Mayne (2006) and Richard Rogers (2007), the Centre continues in its commitment to promoting knowledge and understanding of contemporary architecture through organising exhibitions on the world"s great architects.

Dominique Perrault's name immediately calls to mind the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, an East Paris landmark which, conceived as a non-architecture, the simple delimitation of a volume around garden, is today recognised as having inaugurated a new logic of the architectural object and its environment.

The aim of this exhibition is to introduce the public, through a selection of some fifty projects, to a body of work that cannot be represented by a single building, however emblematic it might be, evidencing rather a continuous development, a perpetual search for groundbreaking forms of expression. Visitors will make their way among screens of the metal mesh that are crucial to Perrault's architecture, of which he says : "These aren't authoritative, impenetrable, separating walls. What they do is create permeability, interrelationship. So from the beginning there's an abolition of enclosure in favour of transition, motion."