La TGB

These towers frame the François Mitterand National Library just up river from the Austerlitz train station on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris. It's the second site of France's national library, the first being on the rue Vivienne over on the Right Bank. When the library was being built in the late 1990s, I heard it referred to more than once as la TGB (Très Grande Bibliotheque, or Very Big Library), a take-off on the name for France's high speed train, le TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse). Haha.

I think that dome belongs to the Eglise Saint-Louis, part of the Hôpital Universitaire Pitié-Salpêtrière complex.

The library is part of a decades-long renovation of this section of the city where old manufacturing plants lined the river along the railroad tracks. Now, large sections of the tracks are disappearing under the rising mix of offices, shops, and university and residential buildings that are filling in the neighborhood.