TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091889/09188900.072

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 14.6 KB | 278 lines

                                                                                DESIGN, Page 88

Paris a la Mitterrand


A panoply of grandiose projects transforms the city for better
and for worse

By Robert Hughes


    When French Presidents want to be remembered, they build.
In France, now as in the 17th and 18th centuries, architecture
is the skin of the state. To place one's name on a style, an
architectural period, is the politician's none-too-secret
fantasy. Paris, the capital, is the main site for this process
and sometimes its victim. Of all the Presidents since Charles
de Gaulle, the one with the most passion for building and
rebuilding, whose architectural schemes most suggest a nostalgia
for the imperturbable power expressed by Louis XIV's architects
during le grand siecle, turns out to be a Socialist: Francois
Mitterrand.

    De Gaulle, rebuilder of postwar France, constructed little
that was new; he was content to restore some of the grander
historic structures of Paris. But Mitterrand, spending budgetary
credits like water, has greeted the 200th anniversary of the
French Revolution with a cluster of "Grands Projets" for Paris
that, in scope and cost, exceed anything tried by previous heads
of the Fifth Republic.

    Georges Pompidou, in a fit of bad urbanism, destroyed Les
Halles and built the Pompidou Center, the cultural multiplex --
museum of modern art, center of industrial design, library and
music institute -- that was meant as a glittering manifesto of
flexibility and transparency: the rhetoric of the "accessible"
museum. It has since become a rusting period piece, plagued by
heavy deficits despite 8 million visitors in 1988 and extensive
government funding ($41 million in 1987). Valery Giscard
d'Estaing's cultural monument was the conversion of the immense
Gare d'Orsay into a museum of the 19th century, which opened in
1986.

    Mitterrand's Big Projects include a refurbished "Grand
Louvre," with its glass-pyramid entrance by I.M. Pei; a new
opera house near the site of the demolished Bastille by Carlos
Ott; a center for Arab studies and politico-cultural p.r. by
Jean Nouvel; a park with exhibition halls for science and
industry in the outlying area of La Villette, whose main feature
is the conversion of the 19th century cast-iron cattle +market
by Bernard Reichen and Philippe Robert; and a vast cubical arch,
more than twice the height of the Arc de Triomphe, that marks
the end of a five-mile axis drawn from the Louvre along the
Champs Elysees to La Defense.

    There are also numerous ,restoration projects, such as the
regilding of Mansart's Dome of the Invalides and the highly
sensitive refurbishment of the 1789 Ledoux customs house, one
of the key images of revolutionary neoclassicism, which stands
at the foot of the Bassin de la Villette. And finally, there is
a flurry of public sculpture. Much of it is distinctly banal,
such as Cesar's bronze commemoration of Picasso as a centaur
with brooms and shovels issuing from his fundament or, worst of
all, Daniel .Buren's conversion of the courtyard of the
Palais-Royal into a wilderness of black-and-white marble stumps.

    Still other projects are to come. Last year Mitterrand
announced that France was to have the greatest library in the
world, a vast extension of the Bibliotheque Nationale housing
material dated 1945 and later. The problems of cataloging and
access raised by using 1945 as an arbitrary breakpoint, to
which neither the President nor his ministers had given a
moment's thought, have caused French librarians to react with
skepticism or outright horror.

    No wonder then that Mitterrand's spending in the name of la
gloire culturelle has been greeted with a good deal of reserve
by other and equally astute political heads. "I understand very
well that a head of state might want to mark his time with a
grand project," former Premier Raymond Barre remarked dryly.
"But the Sun King complex is dangerous when one is manifestly
not Louis XIV."

    Since 1986 these schemes have consumed no less than 60% of
the total outlay of the Ministry of Culture. They are barely
controllable budget chompers, and they consort oddly with
Mitterrand's often declared belief in cultural
decentralization. Their aggregate cost is not yet fully known,
because in some cases, like the new Bastille Opera, on which
some $360 million has been spent so far, the figures are still
climbing fast. The Louvre's renovation, with its glass pyramid,
has cost $30.7 million. The Arab World Institute, a goodwill
project by a country that depends on Middle Eastern oil, cost
$64.9 million, of which an Arab group contributed $28 million.
The huge arch at La Defense will probably cost $540 million, and
so on.

    There is as yet no "style Francois Mitterrand." But there
is a fairly recognizable, if diffuse, "look." Self-dramatizing
high tech would seem to be the language for Mitterrand's
marriage of the corporation and the state. Probably its most
extreme metaphorical example is to be seen in the Arab World
Institute, a building that is generally liked. Throughout this
gracefully detailed structure, architect Nouvel has pushed steel
construction to a watchmaker's pitch of refinement. The most
striking element is its south wall, made of 240 panels of
stainless-steel units hermetically sandwiched between glass.
Each presents a grid of circles and rosettes that evokes Islamic
tile patterns. On closer inspection, every one of these roundels
turns out to be a mechanical device like a camera shutter,
driven by servos linked to photoelectric cells on the facade so
that the wall regulates its own light transmission: thousands
of gleaming sphincters opening and closing in the sun. They will
keep the maintenance crews busy for decades.

    Beyond much dispute, the best of the new state buildings is
the glass pyramid by the American architect I.M. Pei, which
rises in the center of the Louvre's main courtyard and can, in
theory, swallow 15,000 people an hour. When unveiled in 1984,
its design was greeted with cries of horror: What rapport could
there be between this utopian form of glass and stainless steel
and the massive intricacies of blond stone that enclosed it? But
Pei's work is a triumph of urbanism. The pyramid is an
archetypal form, much older than the Louvre as well as much
newer. Spreading downward from its peak, it logically directs
the crowds to the distribution hall below the courtyard. Its
transparency defers to the mass of the older museum, but its
placement anchors the huge court and defines the southeastern
end of the axis running up the Champs-Elysees through the Arc
de Triomphe -- an obsession of Parisian town planners since the
days of Colbert.

    The pyramid, however, is only a stage in the long process
of conversion of the Louvre that will certainly run past the end
of Mitterrand's presidency and may not finish before 1998. When
the Richelieu wing (vacated in June by the Finance Ministry) is
turned into exhibition space, it will add 235,000 sq. ft. to the
museum, much more than the whole Musee d'Orsay. Michel Laclotte,
the Louvre's director, estimates that by the time the
refurbishment is completed, about 80% of the Louvre's nearly
350,000 works of art will have changed their places.

    At the far western end of the five-mile axis from the
pyramid, looming over the area of recent construction known as
La Defense -- a wax museum of architectural sterilities by every
second-rate architect to receive presidential backing since
Pompidou's time -- stands the most gratuitously abstract state
monument of the late 20th century, the Big Arch. It was designed
by Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, who died before
it was finished, and completed by Paul Andreu, who has built
airports from Abu Dhabi to Nice. One person who would have loved
its eerie sense of entwined state and corporate power was Albert
Speer.

    The Big Arch is a cube measuring 360 ft. on a side. Its
vertical members are office towers; the horizontal span holds
conference spaces and ceremonial rooms. The arch opening is as
wide as the Champs-Elysees (230 ft.). It is sheathed in virginal
white marble, brought all the way from Carrara, with an on-site
rejection rate of 25%, at a cost beyond anything in the history
of the Park Avenue bathroom.

    The construction of this behemoth was, beyond argument, a
tour de force. And there are moments when it achieves a kind of
sullen grandeur, as in the rooms below the podium, defined by
the immense concrete webs of the box beams, giving the effect
of a salt mine or a gigantic crypt. Andreu says he did not want
the arch to be a "high-tech demonstration but to use the
technical elements in a Cistercian way; I wanted a classical
balance." To relieve the blankness of the arch opening, he
inserted a feature to give "organic relief" -- a guyed canopy,
or tent, of synthetic cloth, stiffened by trusses and known, a
whit optimistically, as "the cloud." But it would take a nuke,
not a cloud, to fix this pretentious monster. Luckily the rest
of La Defense is so sub-Dallas that the arch has no context to
wreck, and seen from the heart of Paris, it is only a cubical
shimmer on the horizon.

    Mitterrand's administration, not wishing to be remembered
for atrocities like Pompidou's destruction of Les Halles, has
made a point of recycling 19th century industrial buildings. Its
most striking success is the conversion of the 1867 cattle
market at La Villette, a project set in train by Giscard
d'Estaing in 1979. The last steer was trucked from the market
in 1974, leaving a vast structure (4.7 acres), empty, open and
one of the classics of French cast-iron architecture. There was
a competition for a design to turn it into a "cultural forum"
for exhibitions, meetings and so forth. The job went to two
geniuses of recycling, architects Bernard Reichen and Philippe
Robert. They have done it with such unfussed respect for the
breadth and functional clarity of the building's great nave that
the hall becomes, with Nouvel's Arab World Institute and Pei's
pyramid, a high point of new Paris.

    The rest of the Parc de la Villette is a costly failure,
with its dry fountains, stainless-steel pergolas and half-dead
bamboo garden, and especially its follies by the New York-based
designer Bernard Tschumi. Much touted as epigrams of
"deconstructionist" architecture, the follies are pseudo
sculptures in red-enameled steel, forced and smug. Visitors to
the park tend to ignore them, and no wonder.

    The most troubled Big Project is the Opera de la Bastille,
which everyone hates for different reasons. Its problems go far
beyond the disputes over policy and repertoire that led in
January to the firing of its appointed artistic director, Daniel
Barenboim. "What's the difference between the Titanic and the
Opera de la Bastille?" ran a popular Paris quip. "The Titanic
had an orchestra." One columnist proposed an end to the
controversy: recycle the thing as a new prison.

    Right from the beginning, the Bastille was declared a
"modern and popular" opera house, unlike the "elitist" opera
housed in the Palais Garnier's gilded whale of a building. But
there has never been a coherent sentence from Culture Minister
Jack Lang and his cohorts as to what popular opera is supposed
to be. Chairman Pierre Berge, who fired Barenboim, has had harsh
words for the operatic star system, but as the weekly Le Point
acerbically remarked, "Nobody has explained for us the paradox
by which the absence of stars will draw crowds."

    Insiders keep whispering that the Bastille design was
chosen by mistake. The entries for the opera's design
competition had to be anonymous, but it was known that the
Mitterrands had a strong liking for the work of the American
architect Richard Meier. The jury picked what it might have
taken to be a Meier design. It was in fact by an obscure
Uruguayan-born Canadian architect, Carlos Ott. By then, there
was no way back.

    Indeed, the public areas of the Bastille Opera have turned
out to be a fussy compendium of Meieresque design elements,
without much sense of occasion or amplitude of circulation. The
seating is cramped, and the balconies of the main opera hall
seem positively dangerous: they are vertiginously raked, and
their steps are far too narrow, an arrangement likely to
guarantee a distracting supply of broken ankles among those
French opera buffs who do not have the agility of chamois.

    But if there is disappointment in front of the curtain, the
real spectacle of the Bastille Opera is backstage. Scenic
director Michael Dittmann has devised the most impressive
arriere-scene of any opera house in the world. It is of
Piranesian size; the stage can be opened to a depth of 246 ft.,
beyond the dimensions of the most mystic Wagnerian abyss. With
its circulatory system of turntables, lifts, gantry bridges and
modular stage platforms on tracks, scenery can be changed with
almost cinematic speed, and a completely dressed set can be
moved without alteration into the rehearsal theater. There is
also a salle modulable (unfinished), a shrinking and expanding
concert hall whose height, seating and proscenium opening can
all be altered with hydraulic lifts, so that the intimacy of
recitals and chamber pieces can be respected along with the
needs of larger orchestral performance.

    It may be that Mitterrand's desire to make Paris the opera
capital of the world -- a recurrent theme of French cultural
politics -- has landed the city with more opera seats than it
can possibly fill. According to a recent survey, opera is the
least popular of all cultural activities with the French public
(less so even than modern art, to which the French sustain their
immemorial indifference). The "patrimony" -- churches, chateaux,
old quarters, folklore -- gets the highest rating. Yet in 1989
the state is subsidizing opera to the tune of more than $70
million, of which 85% has been allocated for Paris alone.

    But proportion is not the point. Mitterrand's cultural
policies are enmeshed in symbolic spending. In America, which
has never embraced the idea of a state-sponsored culture, such
expenditures would be unthinkable. In France they have ample
precedent. "Non mi parlate delle cose piccole," the aging
Bernini said to the Sun King, who had brought him all the way
from Rome to complete the Louvre: "Do not speak to me of small
projects." Mitterrand would seem to have taken this remark to
heart. When 21st century students of French politics want to
know what his critics meant by the phrase "presidential
monarchy," they will consult, among other evidence, the Big
Projects.