Paris made a bold move in 1977 by building a modern art museum wrapped in large multicoloured pipes in the heart of the city. Now, French art authorities are planning another audacious act: a satellite of the Pompidou Centre that looks like a Chinese peasant’s hat.
While most of France’s great museums are in the capital, this will be the first major national museum to open a branch outside Paris.
The Pompidou Centre Metz in eastern France, due to open in 2008, will show rotating exhibits from the Paris museum’s 56 000 treasures that rarely get seen due to lack of space. Only about 1 300 works can be shown at one time in the main Pompidou Centre.
The expansion comes as part of a new trend in French museums to branch out to better expose their massive collections.
The Louvre plans to open a sister museum in the northern town of Lens in 2009. Heading the new Pompidou’s three-man design team is Japanese award-winning architect Shigeru Ban, who drew inspiration from a conical bamboo hat.
”I bought the hat six years ago in a Chinese clothes shop in Paris when I was already thinking about ideas for roofs,” said Ban.
Playing off the conical theme but to a softer effect, the roof of the Metz museum will rise to a rounded peak at the top and have a gently rippled brim, according to design plans. It will sit atop a gallery space of 10 000-square-metres that, like the Paris Pompidou, will have glass-paneled walls and panoramic views.
Construction of the new Pompidou museum is set to start in a city park in January 2006, with the price tag estimated at €35,5-million ($43-million), the museum said. The project will be funded by local, regional and national government budgets.
Ban won the competition to design the museum with Frenchman Jean de Gastines and Philip Gumuchdjian of Britain. The Japanese architect won the 2002 World Architecture Award for the ”Best House in the World” for his design of a so-called Naked House — a large open plan room in which cubical units can be moved around according to the moods of the occupant.
Ban is also known for building temporary shelters from cardboard rolls. His structures went up in Sri Lanka after last year’s tsunami and in Japan after the 1995 Kobe earthquake. He won the World Architecture Award in 2001 for the Best Building in Europe for an imposing Japan Pavilion made of paper at the Hanover Expo a year earlier.
A small amount of paper will be used in the new project, for acoustics on the ceiling of the museum’s cinema, Ban said.
The original Pompidou Centre’s boxy six-level structure made of steel and glass, with an enclosed escalator snaking up the outside, was built by Italian Renzo Piano and Briton Richard Rogers.
”The meaning of what they did is a special milestone in contemporary architecture,” said Ban, who sought to create a complement that is equally groundbreaking.
”This is a totally different type of building, but the biggest similarity is innovation.”
Innovation earned the Pompidou Centre its share of critics when it opened in 1977. The modern art museum is now one of the most frequently visited sites in France, with about six million people passing through its doors annually.
New and modern sounds good to the authorities in Metz, who see the project as a way to boost tourism. The Pompidou Centre Metz will be the first modern art museum in the city, which is near France’s borders with Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium.
If all goes according to plans, the museum’s opening will follow a long awaited link-up to France’s high-speed TGV train network in 2007.
”It’s very important,” said deputy mayor Andre Nazeyrollas.
”Like all urban architectural and cultural projects, this development is the key to the economic development of the city.” – Sapa-AP