Posts Tagged Nicolas Sarkozy
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.
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.