TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/091889/09188900.072

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 15KB | 259 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.