Posts Tagged France
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 20, 2012
Stuttgart launches a controversial redevelopment of its central station, Burgundy gets a new museum and Frank Gehry's Eisenhower memorial sparks a battle
The recession might be biting hard in Britain, but elsewhere in the world, things are clearly booming. The city of Stuttgart is so gung-ho about the €7bn redevelopment of its central railway station that it can afford not just to go ahead with the ambitious new plan designed by Dusseldorf-based Ingenhoven architects, but to demolish a large part of the existing historic building, a masterpiece by Paul Bonatz and Friedrich Scholer completed in 1928. As recently as 2009, Unesco was considering listing this magnificent building as a World Heritage Site.
The new design by Christoph Ingenhoven's team appears, superficially at least, to be rather fine. Well, have a look at this creamy Deutsche Bahn propaganda film (it's in German, but the visuals speak for themselves).
The trouble with this "Stuttgart 21" scheme is that it not only requires the demolition, starting this week, of the south wing of Bonatz's station, and the felling of 200 trees in the adjacent Schlossgarten, but it reduces the historic concourse to a meaningless architectural void, because all the important activity will take place below ground. Passions are running high: on the night of 12-13 January, 2,000 police were drafted in to clear protestors from in front of the south wing – although a recent referendum suggests that a narrow majority of local people want the project to go ahead.
A far distant fight, two millennia before the railway age – that of the 52 BC Battle of Alesia, when the Roman army under Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls – is commemorated in the fascinating Alesia Museum, Burgundy, which will open to the public on 26 March. Designed by Paris and New York-based Bernard Tschumi Architects, the cylindrical, timber-clad building rises from the spot where Caesar's army gathered. Inside, visitors will see interactive displays contextualising this critical battle. A second circular building, crafted in stone and also by Tschumi, will follow in 2015; set higher up, where the Gauls had their fort, this will house artefacts unearthed from the ancient battlefield.
While the Tschumi buildings are designed to be a subtle intervention in the rural Burgundy landscape, the design and construction company Capita Symonds has announced outlandish designs this week for the Kampala Tower, a 222m-high commercial phallus rising proudly from a new public square in Kampala, Uganda. The 60-storey tower will be the tallest in Africa – although it could just as well be built in Kowloon or Kuala Lumpur. Another country that is apparently booming in terms of new construction is New Zealand.
One architect you might think immune to recession or planning controversies is Frank Gehry. This week, however, Gehry's proposals for a memorial to Dwight D Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States and, from December 1943, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe ("Ike" oversaw the liberation of western Europe that took place with the D-day invasion of France in June 1944), have made the news because the Eisenhower family feels that the architect has underplayed the president's role as a war leader.
Gehry's design is for a memorial park in Washington DC framed by large metal tapestries showing scenes from Eisenhower's roots in Abilene, Kansas. Clearly, Gehry has picked up on Eisenhower's famous quote when he said, at the height of his career, "the proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene." Susan Eisenhower has told AP that "Just about everybody on the [Washington] Mall had humble origins. But, you don't get to the Mall because you had humble origins. You get to the Mall because you did something for which the nation is grateful."
The memorial, and the Mall, are not far from Washington's Union Station, Despite a rollercoaster history over the past five decades, the magnificent station remains intact. Perhaps Stuttgart could learn from Washington, or perhaps from Eisenhower's beloved Abilene, where the local station has certainly seen more productive days.
Constructive criticism: the week in architecture
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on October 7, 2011
Foster and Partners unveil a natty new airport and winsome winery, France builds a museum for lost soldiers, and Camden Town says farewell to the TV-am building
At its best, architecture should set our sights high and lift the spirit. It can do this physically as well as metaphorically, as projects announced this week demonstrate. Foster and Partners has unveiled designs for the new Kuwait airport. This is centred on an elegant terminal in the guise of a giant trefoil, with each of its three curving facades measuring three-quarters of a mile long. Imagine looking down on it from an aircraft window through azure desert skies: it will seem rather like a three-winged Frisbee – you could almost pick it up and send it spinning across the dunes.
From the ground, the new terminal has echoes of the soaring TWA terminal at New York's Kennedy airport, designed by Eero Saarinen. Its great single roof will be both a huge parasol and a bed for solar panels. Inside, daylight will be filtered through slits, chutes and slants, while cascades of water will keep passengers cool. With few changes in floor level, soaring concrete vaults and shady arcades, and with a spirit of flight encoded in its architectural DNA, this should be one of the world's most convincing new airport buildings.
In France, the spirit of thousands of Australian soldiers killed in what was their first major engagement on the Western Front during the first world war is to be honoured with the creation of the Museum of the Battle of Fromelles. Announced this week, the competition-winning designs by Paris and New York-based Serero Architects reveal a shrine-like, octagonal concrete building dug into the hill where the soldiers fought, and alongside the cemetery where they lie.
The mass graves of the soldiers, machine-gunned down in this spot by German troops on 19-20 July 1916, were discovered in 2008. The cemetery was opened last year, and now this thoughtful museum will tell the story of a largely forgotten episode in the first world war. Adolf Hitler, serving with the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry, took part in the battle, as did WH "Jimmy" Downing who, some years ago, told the Sydney Morning Herald: "The air was thick with bullets, swishing in a flat, crisscrossed lattice of death, and hundreds were mown down in a flicker of an eyelid, like great rows of teeth knocked from a comb." There were 1,500 British and more than 5,000 Australian casualties. The architect's aim is to take visitors on a journey through darkness and death to light and life.
Coop Himmelblau, the blue-sky-thinking Austrian architects, have just completed a vast cinema complex in Busan, the South Korean port city, home to Asia's biggest cinema event, the Busan international film festival which opened yesterday. The underside of the cinema's wave-like cantilevered roof – the world's largest – can be used like a vast public screen. Hopefully no director will ever be tempted to remake Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but if they were to, Coop Himmelblau's mind-blowing complex would make a suitably mesmerising backdrop.
Winners of RIBA's Forgotten Spaces 2011 competition, an initiative to raise the design stakes of overlooked corners of Greater London, will be announced at the launch of an exhibition at Somerset House on 19 October. Meanwhile, you can take a peep at the shortlisted entries here. Ideas from architects, designers and local groups include artist-inhabited church spires across London, a city farm alongside Croydon's mainline railway station and event spaces on the rooftops of Bethnal Green tower blocks.
The former TV-am studios, designed by Terry Farrell and opened in 1983, did much to brighten a shadowy canalside corner of Camden Town. Sadly, this playful PoMo building is currently being torn apart and remodelled in the dullest possible corporate manner, especially at a time when PoMo is being celebrated at the V&A. While TV-am was never great architecture and was never intended to last long, it was a cheery creation with an entertaining stage-set interior. It was too young to have been listed, but if a building has to go – for whatever reason – it should be replaced by something better. This hasn't happened here.
And finally, while teetotallers will tut, RIBA has announced a "sociable night with a difference": Drink Architecture. I don't think the idea is to see architecture through the wrong end of a wine bottle, but the first event in London (with Foster and Partners's Jaime Valle discussing the three-winged design of the Faustino winery in Spain's Ribero del Duro region, followed by an explanation of the wines stored there as you taste them) sounds appealing. And if your spirits are suitably raised, visits to the winery, 90 or so miles north of Madrid, can be arranged. And no, Fosters haven't designed Madrid airport.
Digital love: Manuelle Gautrand and the Gaîté Lyrique
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 21, 2011
The Gaîté Lyrique, Paris's newest theatre, is a marriage of past and future so bold it takes the breath away. Jonathan Glancey explores a temple of technology and art
Everyone knows appearances can be deceptive, but the newly renovated Théâtre de la Gaîté Lyrique in central Paris takes the Bourbon biscuit. From the outside, it seems as conservative as any French arts institution. Built in 1862, its slightly pompous facade makes it every inch a creation of Napoleon III's overambitious second empire.
When you walk inside today, though, a beautifully restored Italianate foyer gives way almost immediately to an ultra-modern world of pulsating, bleeping, thumping digital art, music and film. From this month, the building that in the 70s housed a circus school with elephants stabled in the attic will be simply known as La Gaîté Lyrique, an €83m (£72.5m) "theatre for the digital arts" created and paid for by the City of Paris.
In fact, Gaîté Lyrique is far more than just a theatre. Bursting with energy, it is, according to its artistic director Jérôme Delormas, "a tool box", a "place of continual evolution", a "laboratory of cultural motivations". Immediately behind the lavish marble of the lobby is a web of new spaces set across seven floors and shaped to allow the world of digital artistry to let rip.
There is something distinctly French in this marriage between the grandly historical and the audaciously modern. Think of IM Pei's glass and steel pyramid rising from the Louvre's Cour Napoleon, or La Défense, a district of brutal 50s towers that stands to the west of the Champs-Elysées. In the early 70s, Paul Andreu's design for Charles de Gaulle airport evoked travel by spaceship rather than airliner. In 1977, Rogers and Piano's Pompidou Centre emerged from the heart of old Paris like some sci-fi oil refinery, and four years later the TGV came snaking out from under the glass roofs of 19th-century Parisian train sheds, projecting rail transport into a new, 300kph era. Every so often architecture in France, moves suddenly, shockingly forward even though planning and conservation laws can be very tough indeed.
"The Gaîté Lyrique took eight years to redevelop. "We had to think first of the sound," says Manuelle Gautrand, architect of the new-look theatre. "There are 120 apartments in the neighbourhood, so we had to build as quietly as possible and to make sure that even when the performances are exciting, the building is completely quiet. So, each of the performance spaces sits inside walls that sit inside walls; it's like a Russian doll."
It was possible for Gautrand to build inside the walls of the theatre, because while the facade has, in effect, remained unchanged since 1862, the interior had been largely gutted. After a long decline, the theatre was closed in 1987 to make way for Planète Magique, a kind of low-rent Disneyland. Where the glistering auditorium had once stood – in which Offenbach's celebrated operettas played, Victor Hugo celebrated his 70th birthday and Diaghilev's Ballet Russes danced – there rose a clumsy great rollercoaster. Opened in 1989, the theme park closed just two years later. This grand architectural dame then stood empty until its radical transformation began.
Delormas is the first to admit that the Gaîté Lyrique is likely to appeal mostly to an audience aged between 15 and 35: "For once", he says, "it will be a case of young people dragging their parents to a museum." The programme ranges from the latest experimental theatre by the Rimini Protokoll Collective – the young German directors best known for putting Das Kapital on the stage – to music from avant-garde artists such as Brian Eno to 3D digital performances.
You can also come here simply to play the latest computer games. There are studios for artists, equipped with cutting-edge computer technology, a library that stocks hundreds of arts magazines, an auditorium for screenings and talks and, of course, a cafe, where the 19th-century architecture has been offset by funky new furniture and flying saucer-style chandeliers. In full flow – when walls dissolve into videos, three-dimensional computer-generated beings come to life in break-out spaces and futuristic music fills this enormous venue – Paris seems very far off indeed.
The interior is something of a maze; sometimes seeming like an empty warehouse, at others a box of architectural tricks. The main performance space at the heart of the building – one of a number of theatres within the theatre – is lined outside with mirrored panels. Inside, this windowless black box can be transformed into a comfortable auditorium with rows of seats that pop up from under the floor. A second, smaller space features a floor built in steel sections; these can be raised and moved around to create different sets and seating structures.
Galleries and mezzanines around the main performance spaces allow visitors to look into what's happening and, as sound, light and images spill out of performances, these become auditoriums in their own right. Dotted throughout the largely windowless building – most of which is fitted out in a hard factory-like aesthetic, as well as splashes of bright pink, gold and yellow – are colourful mobile booths where you can watch a film, play a game, read or work. Gautrand calls these éclaireuses (girl guides); the idea is that they direct visitors through the ways of this unconventional theatre. "With the help of the éclaireuses," says Gautrand, "you can find a place of your own even in all this colour and noise."
I enjoyed Gaîté Lyrique. It took me into another world. And, yet, the shift between grand Paris and the latest whizzy stuff is as abrupt as a train crash. I couldn't help feeling a little like Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle, befuddled by technology, or Lemmy Caution, the private eye in Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville who arrives in a nightmarish, ultra-modern city.
Alphaville was filmed in La Défense, an area many hate, but which Gautrand loves. The Marseilles-born architect, who set up her own practice in Paris in 1993, is designing a skyscraper to be situated here. A shimmering tower, dressed in what looks like a filigree fabric but is actually multi-angled sunscreens, it will, she says, "soften some of the harder aspects of Alphaville". It will also be in stark contrast to most of the straight up and down office towers that characterise this ageing "city of the future". The project is currently waiting for the final stage of planning permission before construction can begin. Gautrand also designed the eye-catching Citroën 42 showroom on the Champs-Elysées, whose steel and glass facade is made up of giant Citroën logos.
Life, colour, emotion
In Saint-Etienne, a city south-west of Lyon, Gautrand has designed a remarkable Cité des Affaires, steel and glass government offices that snake through the city, further enlivened by three bright yellow entrances which bring a shimmering gold light into the undercrofts and courtyards.
"It is, I suppose, scenographic", says Gautrand, borrowing the language of the theatre. "The building is a densely occupied development, so I have given it, I hope, some life, colour, emotion. Also, I felt that this part of Saint-Etienne was somehow sad; if there had to be new offices here, then they had to have something special, something you cannot quantify." Whatever that something is, the Cité des Affaires is a remarkable development. "As with the Gaîté Lyrique," says Gautrand, "the modernity here is definitely a contrast with the old world around it, but it can be as playful and as atmospheric as a 19th-century operetta, too. Why not?"
So in Saint-Etienne and Paris, visitors and government officials can work and play in an ultra-modern setting that seems theatrical to its very core. Only in Paris, this bright and boisterous new world has been housed behind the walls of a historic theatre, rather as if Jacques Tati was to walk by with an iPhone tucked away in his old raincoat pocket.
France's five most thrilling architects
De Portzamparc is French architecture's most brilliant intellectual. An urban planner as well as an architect, in 1994 he became the first Frenchman to win the Pritzker prize. He's working on several huge projects, including the Cidade da Música in Rio.
Nouvel is an international star, who often represents French architecture abroad. His experimental architecture is characterised by its use of metal and glass, creating buildings that glitter.
In 1990, Perrault delivered his signature building, the industrial, totally transparent Berlier hotel in Paris. He also designed the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, draped in metallic mesh.
Though he builds little, Bouchain is a pioneer, famous for his low-cost transformation of industrial spaces into cultural zones.
François proves that sustainable architecture needn't constrain the imagination. His environmentally friendly buildings use trees, pot plants and other living materials in their construction.
Sophie Trelcat, architecture critic
Paris skyline to be remodelled by Russian Orthodox church
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on March 19, 2011
Cathedral with five onion domes to be erected next to Eiffel Tower will include cultural centre and public garden
It is one of the most recognisable skylines in the world, featuring one of the most famous monuments.
On the banks of the river Seine, Gustave Eiffel's iron tower, the symbol of France, juts high above the 19th-century Haussmann buildings and the trees of the Champ de Mars park that surround it.
But all this is about to change if the Russians have their way.
Moscow has unveiled plans to build a large Orthodox cathedral complete with five golden onion domes next to the Eiffel Tower. The building on the sought-after site will include a cultural centre and public garden, and was agreed directly by the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his Russian counterpart, Dmitri Medvedev.
Architects' drawings show the domes sitting on an undulating roof of glass panels, with the tower in the background.
At 27 metres from the top of the highest dome to the ground, the cathedral is unlikely to detract from a structure that rises to 324 metres. City authorities say they will need to be sure it "fits into its surroundings and is built to last" before giving their approval for the building.
The winning design was unveiled on Friday after an international competition won by a Franco-Russian company.
When Moscow bought the site, formerly the HQ of the French weather service, last year, it was a diplomatic coup as at least two other countries were vying for the land. However, Le Nouvel Observateur magazine reported French concerns that it could be used as a front for spying as it is near a diplomatic complex.
Russian officials in Paris said work on the project was planned to start in 2012 and was likely to cost about €34.5m (£30.1m). Moscow has already paid around £60 million for the site.
"We wanted to find a combination of Orthodox tradition and contemporary architecture to stand out in the heart of Paris," said a spokesman for the church.
Nicolas Sarkozy offers France’s heritage sites to hotel chains
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on January 12, 2011
Nicolas Sarkozy's plan to rent out L'hôtel de la Marine on Place de la Concorde, linked to the revolution, angers historians
Paris boasts so many historic monuments it has been called a living museum. But now Nicolas Sarkozy is under attack for seeking to sell the capital's heritage to luxury hotel chains.
Historians are outraged at government plans to rent out one of France's most important palaces, L'hôtel de la Marine on Place de La Concorde.
A symbol of the nation's bloody history, the palace was the site of the first riots that led to the French revolution in 1789. King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were guillotined outside it.
Designed by the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel, it is one of the best examples of 18th-century royal architecture and its intact collection of furniture and decor is unrivalled, even by the palace of Versailles. But the state-owned building could be transformed into luxury boutiques, plush suites for billionaires or a hotel with swimming pool.
Last month a discreet advert was posted on the site of the French budget ministry advertising the building for long-term lease to private firms which will be encouraged to renovate it.
The French navy, based in the building since the revolution, will leave in 2014 for more modern headquarters. The government has complained it cannot afford the upkeep of the listed landmark, with its hundreds of rooms and grandiose courtyards.
In an open letter to the French president, published by Le Monde newspaper, a group of influential historians said they were "revolted" by the plan to "flog" the palace and reduce it to a "commercial circus".
Sarkozy, who is under fire for building a much-maligned museum of French history, has often complained the country has lost its memory and connection with the past. "France has not lost its memory, it is selling it!" the historians raged.
The former president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing has joined the protest. Art experts are concerned the rent deal, billed as an open contest, is a stitch-up favouring a multinational finance group advised by a former culture minister. The applications process closes next week.
In a drive to develop French heritage sites, an abandoned outbuilding of the palace of Versailles is to be transformed into a luxury 23-room hotel by a Belgian company. The palace of Fontainbleau, south of Paris, will ask for bids to convert its listed barracks.
The pick of Europe’s art deco hotels
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on November 6, 2010
The best-preserved art deco hotels from Devon to Prague
Burgh Island Hotel, Devon
This art deco gem was built in 1929 and has been restored to recapture its 1930s heyday. Look out for retro radios, authentic furniture, original pictures, news clippings and archive photographs.• Bigbury-on-Sea, Devon (01548 810514, burghisland.com). Doubles from £360, including breakfast and dinner
Hotel Martinez, Cannes
Hollywood stars flock to the Hotel Martinez during the film festival each year. It is an unmistakable white, seven-storey art deco building right on the Croisette, and is said to house the most expensive suite in the world.• 73 La Croisette, 06400 Cannes, France (+33 492 987300, hotel-martinez.com). Doubles from £130
Hotel Britania, Lisbon
The Britania was built in the 1940s by Portuguese architect Cassiano Branco, and is the only hotel to survive the turbulence of the Estado Novo era. The bar features original wall paintings, cork floor and furnishings, and the hotel even has a vintage barbershop.• Rua Rodrigues Sampaio 17, 1150-278 Lisbon, Portugal (+351 213 155016, heritage.pt). Doubles from £114
Art Deco Imperial Hotel, Prague
This listed monument was built in 1913-14 and restored in 2005-07, and features an art deco exterior and late‑art nouveau interior. The imposing entrance hall and restaurant boast original tiled walls, mosaic ceilings, decorative pillars and a grand marble staircase.• Na Porici 15, 11000 Prague 1, Czech Republic, (+420 246 011600, hotel-imperial.cz). Doubles from £96
Futuristic Bellegarde is the shape of French rail stations to come
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on July 6, 2010
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
Metz hopes rub of Pompidou’s ‘magic lantern’ will bring tourists
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 11, 2010
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.
The new branch of the Pompidou arts centre in Metz
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 11, 2010
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
What’s the big idea behind the Pompidou-Metz?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 7, 2010
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.