I :heart: Paris & La Belle France:loveya:
Pompidou Centre puts Metz on the mapBy 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