Le Volcan: Havre

Le Volcan, Le Havre, 1982 - Oscar Niemeyer. A photo essay by Mario FerraraLe Volcan is Niemeyer's only permanent work in France, and one of his most concentrated. Completed in 1982, it occupies the heart of Auguste Perret's reconstructed Le Havre - a UNESCO World Heritage city built from rationalist discipline and orthogonal repetition. Against that fabric, Niemeyer placed two white cones: one housing a national theater, the other a public library, both rising from a shared platform of curved ramps, reflecting pools, and open plaza.This volume moves around and through the complex - its sculpted mass against the Norman sky, the tectonic logic of its base, the passages and transitions that make the building inseparable from the ground it inhabits. The photographs register the building as it functions: in use, in light, in the ordinary time of a city square.A title in the BUILT EVIDENCE series.