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Bellegarde station is the prototype for a key French Rail project aiming to put stations back at the heart of communities

With a transparent dome made of plastic tubing, the circular building that welcomes travellers arriving in Bellegarde, in the foothills of the French Alps, resembles a moon base rather than a railway station. Combining advanced technology and bioclimatic architecture, the national rail operator SNCF's most recent creation reflects the publicly owned company's determination to boost the environmental awareness of its buildings and make its stations an emblematic feature of tomorrow's sustainable cities.

"Bellegarde is a prototype for what we plan to do with our biggest stations. Thermal and environmental performance are at the top of our list of target specifications," says Sophie Boissard, who heads Stations and Connections, the business unit set up by SNCF a year ago to operate and capitalise on its 3,000 stations.

Substantially larger than Bellegarde, the new TGV high-speed stations further north at Besançon and Belfort will go even further along the same lines, deploying solar panels, Canadian wells, geothermal energy and a hi-tech bioclimatic hothouse. Nor will this policy only affect new stations. The rail operator intends to enlarge and refurbish at least 100 destinations over the next 10 years, investing some $6bn.

One priority is to improve conditions in buildings that tend to be freezing in winter and baking hot in summer. But there is no question of turning them into air-conditioned coolers all year round. "It isn't financially possible for us and it makes no sense in environmental terms," says Boissard.

Etienne Tricaud, the deputy-head of Arep, SNCF's design subsidiary, says: "What is at stake here is making travellers comfortable without it costing the earth." This is where the bioclimatic systems experimented with at Bellegarde will come into play. The dome is made of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a tough, lightweight polymer derived from Teflon, which is cost-effective and recyclable. It forms a hothouse above the wooden cupola that covers the station. In winter, low-speed fans pump hot air from this cavity into the hall below, maintaining a temperature of 16°C without consuming additional energy. In summer the hothouse produces a chimney effect, drawing off the heat which is replaced by cool air at 10°C rising from a Provençal (or Canadian) well. "This system alone results in 40% energy savings," says Tricaud.

Such "ecologically correct" comfort is all the more important because, according to SNCF's long-term strategy, tomorrow's stations should become "a pivotal point in the sustainable town". On top of being hubs for all forms of public and private transport (main and regional rail links, trams, buses, cars, bicycles), they are set to become mini-town centres, combining offices, business centres and shops, healthcare, childminding and collection services.

"This is definitely the model I want to promote: it is a response to the need for greater density, multiple functions and easy mobility," says Boissard, adding: "This approach makes sense, particularly for our 40 regional [mainline] stations."

Another advantage of such diversification is that it is highly profitable, contributing to the modernisation of railway infrastructure. Without the 10,000 square metres of retail space grafted on to the original project, it would have been difficult to find the means to renovate Gare St Lazare in Paris, due for completion next year. In many towns, the area round the railway station, long abandoned by all but sex shops and shady hotels, is now the focus of a new urban and economic dynamic. "The decline of stations and surrounding neighbourhood was due to the dominance of private cars. The drive to bring business back into town centres and the resulting upturn has reversed this trend," says Boissard.

A similar pattern is apparent elsewhere. In Japan, where transit operators are also property developers, stations are an essential component of town centres, uniting retail and business services. And in Switzerland the federal rail operator SBB decides which businesses can be located near stations to achieve the right urban mix.

This article originally appeared in Le Monde

French president hails landmark Paris gallery's Metz outpost as culturally and economically important to deprived region
In pictures: the all-new Pompidou in Metz

Nicolas Sarkozy hailed a renaissance of one of France's most overlooked regions today as he inaugurated the Centre Pompidou Metz, the first regional outpost of Paris's landmark gallery and a project expected to give a much-needed boost to the north-eastern Lorraine.

The distinctive building with its undulating roof was designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and his French colleague Jean de Gastines. It has been variously compared to a Smurfs' house, a magic lantern and a Chinese hat, and its high-calibre modern art exhibitions are expected to attract around 200,000 visitors a year to the out-of-the-way city.

"The Lorraine has suffered greatly in recent decades from restructuring, transfers, changes, the textile and steel industries, the mines, the military," said the French president, standing inside the entrance hall of the new gallery ahead of its official opening to the public tomorrow.

"This museum, which is a strong cultural gesture, is at the same time part of a strategic policy of economic development ... In this remarkable architectural gesture, we will from now on be able to take hold of the renaissance of Metz and the renaissance of the Lorraine," he said.

The first step in France's attempts to decentralise its cultural treasures away from the capital, the Parisian flagship's €72.5m (£62.2m) sister gallery was inspired by the Guggenheim Bilbao – the Frank Gehry structure that turned the struggling Basque seaport into a sophisticated citybreak destination. Just as the Louvre hopes to do in the former mining town of Lens, where it is planning to open its own offshoot in 2012, the board of the Centre Pompidou Metz (CPM) is determined to emulate the Bilbao boom.

Metz, a military city long fought over by France and Germany, is located in an unglamorous part of the country and is expected to be hit hard by cuts to the armed forces brought in by Sarkozy's government. Although connected since 2007 by high-speed rail to the capital in 80 minutes, it has yet to experience the TGV "electroshock" from which other French cities have benefited.

"The Pompidou is going to radically alter the image of our town," said Jean-Marie Rausch, the city's former mayor, who believes that as many as 400,000 people could flock to the CPM each year. In a literal sense it already has – growing out of former wasteland, the tent-like structure with its white Teflon roof dominates the Amphithéatre district.

While it will not have a permanent collection of its own, the CPM will be able to borrow from its Parisian equivalent in order to put on exhibitions which its directors say will be of the highest quality. As Europe's biggest modern art museum, the Centre Pompidou in Paris has a dazzling collection of around 65,000 works and only enough space to show a fraction of that at a time.

For its inaugural exhibition, entitled Chefs-d'oeuvre? – Masterpieces? – director Laurent Le Bon has acquired around 700 works from its sister gallery and dozens from other institutions in an exploration of what constitutes a masterpiece. Paintings by Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky and Miro are amongst those on display. One, Henri Matisse's final self-portrait called La Tristesse du Roi, was transported to Metz despite its great fragility and value.

11 May 2010: The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, opens the new offshoot of Paris's 1970s cultural institution in the north-eastern city of Metz

The legendary Paris gallery now has a regional outpost. Will it live up to the name? Jonathan Glancey takes a high-speed train to find out

This is a very strange fish. What first strikes the eye about the Pompidou-Metz is its bizarre, undulating roof. This complex structure, made of no fewer than 10 miles of laminated spruce and larch, is an extraordinary creation, drooping over the concrete, steel and glass core of the building in a seemingly random fashion, as if a passing bird had dropped a giant floppy hat on its head.

Coated in fibreglass, the roof has been shaped as much for practical reasons as for aesthetic ones – to keep sun, rain and snow at bay. It is, I can't help thinking, the building's best and most redeeming feature. Up close and on the inside, concrete, steel and glass take over, while every glance upwards allows another view of this glorious timber form.

The Pompidou Centre in Paris, opened in 1977, is one of the most visited art galleries in the world. So it makes perfect sense that it should choose to expand – creating this regional outpost in Metz, north-east France, a short, sensationally fast (1hr 25mins) TGV ride away from the capital. The Pompidou-Metz, rising up as if from the ocean like a great conch, was meant to open three years ago, but such experimental architecture rarely goes exactly to plan, and I suspect that roof might be to blame. It is now seven years since the design contest was won by a team comprising Shigeru Ban (Tokyo), Jean de Gastines (Paris) and Philip Gumuchdjian (London). Their curious new building, due to open next month, is just two minutes walk from the town's magnificent central station, designed like a castle by German architect Jürgen Kröger in the early 1900s.

Just as the original Pompidou was designed to reinvent a large area of central Paris, so the Pompidou-Metz forms the centrepiece of the city's amphitheatre quarter, a district formerly given over to industry. It is, by any standards, an important building: much cultural pride rides on its curving shoulders, locally and nationally. And for Metz, a city not on the regular tourist beat, here is a chance to reinvent itself.

So does the new gallery pull it off? Beneath that hat, the building at first feels all over the place, its galleries, cafes and intervening public spaces rushing off in all directions. Fishier and fishier. Yet some sort of logic does start to emerge. You enter a lobby, with the usual cafe, bookshop and so on, before entering the forum, a soaring space for displaying large-scale installations (since the advent of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, every gallery needs one). Above and through this vast space, three huge concrete tubes crisscross, with windows at either end. These are the three principal galleries, reached by stairs or lift in the central 77-metre tall tower, which stands like the mast on a ship, skewering your attention. Each space has been carefully crafted to offer framed views of the city's monuments, including Kröger's fairytale station.

What curious galleries these are: concrete corridors in the air relying, to a great degree, on artificial lighting in an era when it has become commonplace for galleries to demand diffused daylight everywhere. Ban points out the advantages: these galleries are entirely free of columns, or any other interruption, so offer seamless spaces for showcasing art. In any case, this is meant to be as radical a building as the original Pompidou, which stunned the world with its own big idea: wearing its insides outside, it looked for all the world like a brightly painted North Sea oil rig.

The architects were well aware of the extraordinary story of Metz itself when putting their design together. Perilously close to the border with Germany, Metz has changed hands many times. This sense of flux invades the fabric of this new building – in the sense that nothing is wholly certain here and anything, culturally, can happen. Even the funding reflects this flux: although fundamentally a French project, the €69m (£61m) Pompidou-Metz has also been funded by the EU.

Five centuries of masterpieces

Its tall tower leads up to a rooftop cafe-restaurant, a viewing gallery, and a studio intended for live performances, particularly of an experimental type. From up here, the building looks and feels more like the big top of a circus, with views out to new landscaped gardens planted with cherry trees. Throughout, though, this is a strange and ambivalent building. It has the feeling of being a book of bits rather than a considered, tightly edited volume. This may be the point: such spatial oddity and aesthetic uncertainty goes, I think, to the heart of the Pompidou-Metz project. The idea here is that anything might go – that art, architecture and curatorship is an adventure rather than an ordained or highly governed experience.

Like its predecessor, the Pompidou-Metz will take some getting used to. Much, of course, turns on the quality and variety of what goes on show; the first major exhibition will be an ambitious attempt to find out what makes a masterpiece by displaying 800 art works drawn from the past five centuries. What is for sure, though, is that the gallery is not some opportunistic franchise, there to cash in on the Pompidou name, but an art centre in its own right, intended to have an identity very much its own.

Although the product of team work, the design bears many of the hallmarks of Ban, an American-educated Japanese architect celebrated for his work with unexpected materials: houses made from recycled paper tubes, a museum made from 156 shipping containers. Ban has the knack of conjuring inventive buildings from very little. The Pompidou-Metz, and certainly its roof, is very much his kind of structure.

Ban describes it as a "crustacean". When I look back at this provocative new building from the gaping mouth of Metz-Ville station, sunlight flashes off its roof, making it vanish for a moment – as if it had slid back into some primordial sea.

From Venice to Vegas: Other gallery outposts

The idea of creating branches of established museums is not a new one. In 1969, Peggy Guggenheim handed the collections in her Venetian palazzo to her uncle Solomon, making it a European outpost of his famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed museum in New York. London's Tate opened its first regional outpost, Tate Liverpool, in 1988, in a magnificent warehouse given a makeover by James Stirling. Tate St Ives, designed by Evans and Shalev, followed five years later.

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and the regional Tates are all galleries with their own special characters, collections and displays; it would be unfair to call any of them clones. But what has changed in recent years is the idea of the museum or gallery "franchise": a branch of the Guggenheim, Louvre or Hermitage borrowing shows, most of its ideas and content, and, most importantly, its name from a parent institution.

Since the 1990s, the Guggenheim has opened new branches around the world, even in Las Vegas (a failure: it closed in 2003). Las Vegas was also host to the hybrid Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, which closed in 2008. Frank Gehry designed the eye-popping branch in Bilbao, while future Guggenheims are under construction in Guadalajara, Mexico (due to open in 2011) and Abu Dhabi (Frank Gehry again, 2011). The first major Louvre branch, a giant mushroom designed by Jean Nouvel (below), is taking shape in Abu Dhabi for 2012. In London, the Victoria and Albert museum is preparing to venture beyond the confines of South Kensington: the first V&A "abroad" will be built in Dundee, Scotland.

In architectural terms, the danger is that these can be expensive, over-the-top projects, parachuted into far-off countries without the subtlety that comes from architects working within the confines and discipline of cities they know well. Given carte blanche, there is a tendency to design something a little too wilful or impermanent.

Every night for the next three months, a 12-minute show will take place - one minute for each decade the monument has been up and standing

Responses to Nicolas Sarkozy's vision for a new 'Grand Paris' include a verdant landscape like New York's Central Park, and a system of motorways through the city centre

Today, French president Nicolas Sarkozy will receive the ten architects selected to create Le Grand Paris. Richard Rogers is one of them. Earlier this week, they each gave a 30-minute presentation of their visions (see it here). The task is herculean, the mission quasi-impossible, but the challenge absolutely irresistible for any ambitious architect.

For he or she knows that, as Paul Goldberger writes in the New York Times, "politics and architecture have always been inseparable in this city". And that "Parisians, with their long and deep commitment to the idea that the city is in the most profound sense a public place, feel that Paris is very much their own possession."

The most visited city in the world, here is a capital whose great talent has been to interweave the grandeur of its official buildings with the everyday charm of its many quartiers. Or as ex-Parisian and writer Adam Gopnik puts it in his book Paris to the Moon: "Paris marries both the voluptuous and the restricted. It is not the yeses but the noes of Paris, not the licences it offers love but the prohibitions it puts in its way that make it powerful. "

The challenge however is not to reshape Paris, but rather to extend its inherent beauty to its outskirts, les banlieues – a web of small villages, some terribly grand and chic (Neuilly, Versailles, Saint Mandé, Vincennes, Saint Germain-en-Laye), others modest and provincial-looking (Montreuil, Pantin, Malakoff, Montrouge, Saint Gervais) and others still, socially ravaged and architecturally dehumanised (La Courneuve, Clichy-sous-bois). And also to link them. But how do you bring together so many different styles and the city's "enormous disparity", as Richard Rogers calls it, into one Grand Paris – especially when the city is so clearly defined geographically by its gates, shadows of former fortifications, and now le périphérique, the circular road encasing Paris? The simple answer is: by being bold. But also by understanding the fabric of French society and its psyche.

The different sketches and 3D renditions of the ten projects make audacious and compelling viewing (see them here). Antoine Grumbach proposes to build the Greater Paris along the Seine right up to the harbour of Le Havre. He may have taken inspiration from Napoleon who once said: "Paris-Rouen-Le Havre: one single city with the Seine as its main road." Water is also an idea the Italians Bernardo Secchi and Paola Vigano have developed: their Paris is laid out as a "sponge" in which waterways are the new motorways. Christophe de Portzamparc proposes to build four "archipelagoes" and create the biggest European rail station in the north suburb of Aubervilliers. Yves Lion offers the vision of a Paris engulfed in forests and fields where every citizen would cultivate their own vegetable patch. Richard Rogers offers to cover up railway lines that dissect the city by placing huge green spaces and networks above them. In the most brutalist, Le Corbusier-esque project, the Dutch practice MVRDV imagines a tower-block in place of the Sorbonne and motorways cutting through the heart of Paris.

As a Parisian born and bred, I thought the most convincing presentation came from Parisian architect and sometime presidential candidate Roland Castro. He seems the only one to really understand the Parisian mentality, the importance of architecture and politics, grandeur and charm, poetry and citizenship. He not only suggests moving the Elysée Palace to the tough north-eastern suburbs, but also proposes to create new cultural landmarks and governmental buildings, together with a New York-style Central Park on the grim housing project of La Courneuve. The idea is to inject grandeur (as conveyed by the cultural and official institutions) and if possible, beauty, to Paris's many environs.

Big plans to redesign Paris must be matched by many smaller ones that allow its existing street life to flourish

Is Paris immune from destruction? History suggests that the French capital has been one of the most charmed, or lucky, cities of all times. It was occupied for long years by the perfidious English during the 15th century. It was the backdrop to the gory St Bartholomew's Massacre of 1572, the Revolution of 1789 and the guillotine-driven terror that followed. It was surrendered to the Prussians in 1871 and to Adolf Hitler in 1940. As Allied troops drew close to Paris in 1944, Hitler ordered the city's destruction. The German military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz, ignored his commander-in-chief and surrendered the city at Gare Montparnasse to Free French forces, letting it come through the war more or less unscathed.

Destruction came only after the second world war, and then it was at the hands of politicians, technocrats, planners, big business and architects armed with big plans. Baron Haussmann's mighty efforts to rebuild Paris for Napoleon IIIin the mid-19th Century changed the face of much of the city.Yet, they seem almost modest compared with the aggressive modernisation programmes that witnessed the destruction of Les Halles (the legendary food market fondly known as the "belly of Paris"), the construction of brutal arterial roads, and the creation of suburbs so hideous that they make London's most banal outposts seem chic. Even Le Corbusier's madly idealistic plan to demolish half of the city centre and replace it with high-quality, high-rise apartment blocks set in a new urban parkland look charming in comparison.

In the 1980s, I remember watching with genuine shock as the mass-produced, neo-classical concrete apartment blocks designed by Ricardo Bofill were piling high at St Quentin-en-Yvelines and Marne-la-Vallée. These outer suburbs were, in theory, to have been a kind of Versailles for the People, yet in reality they were monumentally scary places. These were the most urbane – if not the best– of the new Parisian suburbia created over the past twenty-five years.

Given the wretched divide between the Paris of our collective dreams and the Paris of underprivileged, excluded suburban sprawl, it's hardly surprising that President Sarkozy and Mayor Delanoë wish to be seen to be doing something about a problem that can only cause ever more problems for Paris and France. They have asked for architects – ten of them, and big names – for grand plans. This is often said to be the Parisian way.

It's here, I can't help thinking, that Paris should be careful. There is a place in the city for modern grandeur and spectacle, as Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano proved with the design of the eye-boggling Pompidou Centre in the 1970s. But surely what is needed is a way not just of improving the look of the poor parts of the city, and linking them to the centre with parks and green avenues, but also of creating and nurturing the education, the jobs, the businesses and the ways of life that will allow Paris to develop humanely while enhancing its character at the same time.

Recent plans for the city, championed by both Sarkozy and Delanoë, have been to bling the city up with a new generation of wilfully crass skyscrapers spelling the names of Global Brands and Big Business in letters that make the illuminated signs of Times Square look as demure as candles in a Surrey church.

Big plans mustn't be allowed to smother Paris. No single architect can ever right the city's wrongs, or come up with ideal, universal solutions. Plans on anything like a big scale will need the involvement of many different people and sectors of Parisian society if they are to have a chance of working. They need to be matched by hundreds of small plans that will allow the streets of Paris from the Marais to Marne-la-Vallée to flourish in a way that is all their own.

The current recession affords Paris the opportunity to plan for something far more important than the global vanities, and destructiveness, of neo-liberal economics; it's time to plan for the life of Paris and its people.

Ten of the world's most renowned architects present their strategies for a dramatic overhaul of the world's most visited city

It's the world's most visited city, a tourist dream of grand, historical buildings and cobbled charm. But Paris's secret shame has always been the horror lurking behind its peripherique ring road - the moat that protects the city's 2 million people from at least 6 million others who live outside in high-rise, ethnic ghettoes or suburban sprawl, choked by dismal public transport and shabby green space.

Now Nicolas Sarkozy wants to answer the critics who call him a cultural philistine by plunging into his new love for architecture and creating a Greater Paris that would be world's most environmentally friendly and boldly designed metropolis.

When the president invited 10 of the world's most renowned architects to the Elysée last year and lauded architecture as art that the citizen "does not need a ticket for", Paris sat waiting for him to announce his own grand building project, along the lines of François Mitterrand's glass pyramid in the Louvre.

Today as architects including London-based Richard Rogers, as well as French prizewinners Jean Nouvel and Christian de Portzamparc, present their various strategies for Grand Paris, it is clear that the president is aiming higher than Mitterrand's isolated architectural gems.

He wants to style himself as patron of the most ambitious urban overhaul since Baron Haussmann dramatically changed the face of Paris in the mid-19th century when he carved out wide boulevards and the Champs Elysée.

But the Greater Paris project to reunite Paris's centre with its neglected outskirts is steeped in controversy as local and national politicians fight over its boundaries, budget, population and new identity before the architectural debate has begun.

In an exclusive preview of their strategy, Richard Rogers's group told the Guardian yesterday that the biggest challenge was Paris's "enormous disparity" and the "staggering psychological barrier" between the core of the city and the world beyond the ring-road.

"I don't know any other big city where the heart is so detached from its arm and legs," Rogers said at the start of the project.

His team of architects, who have worked with the London School of Economics and French sociologists, will today propose a bold plan to unite Paris's disparate communities, beginning by covering over the railway lines that "carve up" the city and creating a vast network of lush parks above the tracks.

Mike Davies, director of the project, said: "The train lines going into Gare du Nord and Gare de l'Est are currently canyons of void." He proposed creating "a continuous green space, a green network" miles long that would link the centre of Paris to its deprived north-eastern outskirts. Underneath it, a separate, hidden layer would contain the mechanics of renewable technologies aimed at launching Paris into a low carbon future.

The Rogers proposals also call for state intervention to completely overhaul areas such as Clichy-sous-Bois, which exploded in urban riots in 2005. Davies described the high-rises as "separate blocks in space", plonked down in isolation with no identity, city fabric, or village life around them.

"The great unwritten and unsaid is that residents tend to be similar ethnic origin. It's not a mixed system," he said. "Monoculture is one of Paris's biggest problems."

The plans seek to bring in new, mixed populations to the poor high-rises and the business district La Defence, extend high-speed train lines, create a new metropolitan transport system and cut the myriad layers of local government.

Rogers, who changed the face of Paris in the 1970s when he co-designed the Pompidou centre, will present one of 10 competing strategies that go on show to the public next month. But the question remains whether Sarkozy will act on the various proposals and launch Paris's biggest overhaul in centuries. "It has to be at the highest level of modern design," Davies said. "Ordinariness won't draw people there."

Other ideas to be unveiled today include the architect Roland Castro's plan to build a New York-style central park on Paris's infamous drab housing projects of La Courneuve, and Christian de Portzamparc's concept for a high-speed elevated train that would run along the ring road.