1868 – Salle Labrouste, Richelieu Library, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

For more than 250 years the national library was housed in a complex in this location. At the behest of Napoleon III. the original library was built here by Henri Labrouste who had made his name with the earlier Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.

This, now named after him, is the large Reading Room, which like Sainte-Geneviève, uses cast iron. Described as a “grand and delicate essay in cast iron and wrought iron brings a host of hovering domes to form a glorious secular baldacchino for the library’s secular readers.”. Now considered a masterpiece of 19th-century architecture. It features a large open space with nine domed skylights supported by sixteen slender, elegant iron columns. Since 1995, there is a new Bibliothèque Nationale de France in eastern Paris. This now serves as the main library for the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), specializing in art history and archaeology collections.