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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
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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
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