TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=89TT2466> <title> Sep. 18, 1989: Paris A La Mitterrand </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1989 Sep. 18, 1989 Torching The Amazon </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> DESIGN, Page 88 Paris a la Mitterrand </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>