Pompidou Centre puts Metz on the map

[marmar]

I :heart: Paris & La Belle France:loveya:






Pompidou Centre puts Metz on the map

By John Lichfield in Paris
Tuesday, 11 May 2010


The cultural grand tour of Europe will have another stopping off point from this week – Metz, the Bilbao of the North. President Nicolas Sarkozy will officially open a €86m (£74m) branch of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in a beautiful, but comparatively little visited, cathedral city 170 miles east of Paris.

Metz (population 280,000), a former garrison town in the heart of the Lorraine steel belt, hopes to recreate the success of the European branch of New York's Guggenheim museum, which has transformed the fortunes of Bilbao in northern Spain since 1997.

Like the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou-Metz has been given a spectacular and unconventional building. It resembles a white Teletubby house; or a collapsed parasol; or a giant stingray.

But unlike its celebrated parent, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, built in 1977, the Metz Pompidou does not flaunt its innards to the world. The roof, a wooden frame covered with fibreglass and Teflon, is supported by pillars but does not connect with the building's main walls. Intensive tests were needed with models to prove that the design – by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban and a French colleague Jean de Gastines – would repel the weather and art thieves.

The Metz Pompidou is the first stage in a drive to "decentralise" the French state's enormous art collection. A branch of the Louvre will follow in 2012 in Lens, a former coal town, only one hour from the Channel Tunnel. ...........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pompidou-centre-puts-metz-on-the-map-1970566.html

[onehandle]

1. France spends more on the arts as a percentage of its national budget than any other country.

We spend the least in the Western world.

Paris is the greatest city of all.

[marmar]

2. "Paris is the greatest city of all"

Without a doubt.

[onehandle]

3. One of mine.

It was a quick snap with a camera that was primarily for digital video, but the city is very forgiving.

[marmar]

4. Awesome....You can't make Paris look bad.

Even Boulevard de Clichy has a sleazy beauty to it.

[tuckessee]

5. That's an odd headline because I've heard of Metz before.

And I know I already posess maps denoting the location of Metz. I wonder if my maps belonged to a time traveler from the future?

They must not take cartography very serious in France if they've been leaving off a world famous fortress city with a population of over a quarter million.

[comrade snarky]

6. The perfect excuse to go back!

Now all I need is that big pile of money I left around here somewhere...