This is a very strange fish. What first strikes the eye about the Pompidou-Metz is its bizarre, undulating roof. This complex structure, made of no fewer than 16km of laminated spruce and larch, is an extraordinary creation, drooping over the concrete, steel and glass core of the building in a seemingly random fashion, as if a passing bird had dropped a giant floppy hat on its head.
Coated in fibreglass, the roof has been shaped as much for practical reasons as for aesthetic ones — to keep sun, rain and snow at bay. It is, I can’t help thinking, the building’s best and most redeeming feature.
The Pompidou Centre in Paris, opened in 1977, is one of the most visited art galleries in the world. So it makes perfect sense that it should choose to expand — creating this regional outpost in Metz, north-east France, a short ride away from the capital.
The Pompidou-Metz, rising up as if from the ocean like a great conch, was meant to open three years ago, but such experimental architecture rarely goes exactly to plan, and I suspect that roof might be to blame. It is now seven years since the design contest was won by a team comprising Shigeru Ban (Tokyo), Jean de Gastines (Paris) and Philip Gumuchdjian (London). Their curious new building, due to open in May, is designed like a castle by German architect Jurgen Kroger in the early 1900s.
Throughout, this is a strange and ambivalent building. It has the feeling of being a book of bits rather than a considered, tightly edited volume. This may be the point: such spatial oddity and aesthetic uncertainty goes to the heart of the Pompidou-Metz project. The idea here is that anything might go — that art, architecture and curatorship is an adventure.
The gallery is not some opportunistic franchise, there to cash in on the Pompidou name, but an art centre in its own right, intended to have an identity very much its own.
Ban describes it as a “crustacean”. When I look back at it from the gaping mouth of Metz-Ville station, sunlight flashes off its roof, making it vanish for a moment — as if it had slid back into some primordial sea.