Body lines.

Mediatheques are a particularly French building type, which allows individuals to approach a wide range of cultural activity in ways they choose themselves. This example plays a key role in revitalising the inner city of Orleans.

'A mediatheque has a specific purpose: it is a place where individuals find for themselves ways of enlarging their understanding, all in quite different ways.' That is the way in which Pierre du Besset and Dominique Lyon approached their competition-winning scheme for the Orleans Mediatheque. It is a noble concept, strange to many non-Gallic cultures. The mixture of instruction and leisure, entertainment and scholarship, electronic media and the printed word, formal meetings and private contemplation, exhibitions and introversion is perhaps unique to France. And no self-respecting French city would be able to hold up its head without a mediatheque. How different from the Anglo-Saxon countries, where those wonderfully powerful nineteenth-century inventions, the public libraries, are being closed down in almost every city (particularly in the centres of old ones). France may have been very late to understand the importance of the public library - indeed, when the Pompidou Centre was first opened, it was virtually the only public library in the capital. But Pompidou was, maybe, the first Mediatheque and its updating of the library idea for the turn of the twentieth century has been extremely influential in France. Ever since the Revolution, there has been a noble ideal of a state that will use its strength to promote the life of individuals and almost the whole of French history since 1789 has been a series of attempts to resolve the ideal's paradox: the mediatheque as a type is one of the most successful tactics in the perennial battle between opposites.

The site in Orleans was difficult. The dusty boulevards of the city's inner ring, where the ancient fortifications had been until 1848, had become a rather seedy series of car parks. The city decided to improve the whole lot and relate the inner city to its surrounding nineteenth- and twentieth-century extensions. Aymeric Zublena was appointed master planner and called for a major reorganisation of traffic, the planting of the boulevards as gardens - and the creation of some major civic works at key points.

This is how the mediatheque came to be on an angle of the inner ring, and it explains much about its form. Plainly, a building supported by the taxes of all the citizens should have a strong figure, as well as offering services to everyone. It curves out to make the most of its corner position and is flanked by a heavy and dull neo-Gothic church, a '60s slab-block and a sullen shopping centre, so the delicacy of the frilly exterior (perforated aluminium brises-soleil) comes as something of a relief, like a cascade of petticoats after a great many greasy denim overalls. But the architects did not want just to be frilly and pretty. About halfway up, a sort of double-height mesh-covered tummy in aluminium and glass billows out to accommodate a reading room that looks over the old town. In the upper levels the analogy can perhaps be strained to suggest lascivious exposure of the inner skin - large planes of smooth glass as the frills are cut back to give panoramas at videotheque and youth levels. Yet, however sexy the front of the building, the back is extremely utilitarian: horizontal strips of window cut through drear walls of vertical corrugated metal - a rather animated debutant has been conflated, armadillo-like, with one of the grimmest concierges you can imagine.

In proper post-structuralist fashion, one of the architects' aims was to avoid expressing conventional hierachies of knowledge too clearly. The plan is certainly divided into 'domaines', but the architects hope that there is no clear route, and that people will choose their own path, following the promptings of individual curiosity. This is not to say that the spaces are unremarkable and formless. Each is given particular character by differing heights, planning and by different forms of contact with the outside world through the sun-screens and the glass panels of the elevations - in a sense, the spaces speak through the facades.

The architects liken the result, particularly the inside, to a 'cassetete chinois': a Chinese puzzle - an appropriate model for an organisation that tries to comprehend contemporary culture.