Louvre Reaches Out to the Regions

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Louvre reaches out to the regions

Some of the worlds masterpieces have an extraordinary new home in one of the poorest

towns in France. Ellis Woodman reports on the new Louvre Lens museum .

Even were it of no great architectural merit, the Louvres new outpost in the northern

French town

of Lens would have to be counted as one of the more remarkable buildings to have been

built in Europe in recent years.

Costing 150 million (120 million), this is a very grand projet indeed, realised at a time

when spending cuts have seen public buildings of even a tenth of its budget in short supply.

Its unlikeliness is made all the greater by the nature of the place in which it has been built.

Following the opening of a satellite of the Centre Pompidou in Metz in 2010, the Louvre-Lens

represents the latest product of an ongoing policy to disseminate the holdings of Pariss

major

cultural institutions to the regions. Lying a 40-minute train journey from Lille, Lens is one of

the

poorest towns in France: a one-time mining community whose industrial base was

eradicated in the23/05/13 Louvrereaches out totheregions - Telegraph

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second half of the past century.

The overwhelmingly flat landscape here is still dominated by the volcano-like presence of

two

spoil heaps on the edge of town the only other significant feature being the stadium of the

local

football team. Pretty much all else is scrappy terraces of two-storey brick-workers houses.

The

sense is rather as if the National Gallery had established a branch in Barnsley.

The site is a former mine, which the project has transformed into a 20-hectare park. In a

town that

doesnt enjoy much in the way of public space its main square is scarcely more than a

parking lot

this represents a hugely valuable resource which has been knitted into a larger masterplan

for

Lenss future development.


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The work of Sanaa, a Tokyo-based firm famed for projects of startlingly minimalist

expression, the

museum has a studiedly unemphatic exterior. Six linked, flat-roofed volumes sprawl across

the

site, each presenting a single if very generously dimensioned storey above ground. Spare

material choices consolidate the diffident expression.

Alternating between full-height glass and highly reflective polished aluminium cladding, the

jostling blocks conjure a distinctly agro-industrial air. A closer look reveals refinements such

as

the ever-so-slight curvature of walls that on first glance appear to run straight a gesture

that lends

them greater responsiveness to changes in light conditions but, however chic the detail of

the

building may be, one can still rather too easily imagine visitors mistaking it for a complex of

greenhouses and packing plants.

In time, that impression should soften, as the architectures neutrality has clearly been

conceived

as a foil to the yet-to-be-completed park.

This has been structured around a network of paths in white concrete that correspond to the

lines of

the old haulageways. As they approach the museum, they knot together and provide the

backdrop

for a cast of engagingly peculiar features: wobbly rings of moss, amoeba-like patches of

black

mining deposit, constellations of red lights and grassy embankments of kookily croissant-like

form. Sharing a busily graphic character, they boisterously counterpoint the sheer, impassive

surfaces of Sanaas building.

A large volume in the middle of the ensemble houses the entrance lobby, its connection with

the

park enforced by full-height glazing, the continued use of white concrete to form the floor,

and the

location of doors on all four frontages. Happily, the desired sense of permeability has been


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supported by the decision to allow visitors free admission. The space inside is effectively an

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terrain in which areas of repose a bookshop, caf, mdiathque (cultural hub) and

education

space have been set within bulbous freestanding enclosures of curved glass.

Walking into this vitreous world is an experience rather like finding oneself blessed with X-

ray

vision, but the glass isnt entirely invisible. The thrill of the space is as much to do with the

abundance of reflections as with its transparency.

From here we find a large temporary exhibition space on one side currently housing a

show

drawn from the Louvres Renaissance holdings and, on the other, the buildings chief

attraction,

the Galerie du Temps. This remarkable space presents 200 objects displayed in chronological

order so as to provide a crash course in art history from antiquity to the 1840s the span of

the

Louvres collection.

The rooms 120 metre-long side walls have again been faced in polished aluminium and kept

free

of art. Instead, the exhibits which begin with a Mesopotamian statue dating from two

millennia

before the birth of Christ and conclude with Delacroixs icon of the French Revolution,

Liberty

Leading the People (1830) have been presented on plinths and freestanding walls, the

unspooling years being registered by a timeline that extends down the length of one wall.

French art critics have not been entirely won over by the greatest-hits display strategy, with

Didier

Rykner, the editor of La Tribune de lArt, complaining that the Louvres policy of assigning

hangs

to the provinces with the sole ambition of lining up [high-profile] works means that the

museum


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management feels the inhabitants of Lens are not capable of understanding something a

little more

demanding intellectually.

That noted, judged on its own terms, the Galerie du Temps has to be deemed a tremendous

success.

The display 20 per cent of which will be refreshed each year is replete with front-ranking

treasures, and Sanaa has made a very beautiful room to show them in.

Given the vast expenditure involved, the projects opening earlier this month was inevitably

attended by much talk about the Bilbao-style regeneration that it might trigger. However,

given how

little else Lens currently has to offer, that feels like a highly optimistic expectation.

And yet, is it worth a trip? Absolutely: a day return from London by Eurostar couldnt be

more

straightforward, while if you want to make a weekend of it, be sure to add Lutyenss nearby

Memorial to the Missing of the Somme to your itinerary as great a building as a British

architect

built in the last century.

Sanaas efforts cant quite compete with that, but they have built an extremely impressiveproject,23/05/13 Louvrereaches out totheregions - Telegraph


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which houses some of the worlds great works of art. It is more than deserving of a visi

Louvre Reaches Out to the Regions

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