METZ, France — It’s the roof that inspires description. A giant manta ray! A gleaming, white UFO! A crustacean in its shell!
Whatever you call it, the tour de force of the striking new Pompidou-Metz, a branch of the Paris museum in northeast France, is its dazzling white, undulating roof pierced by three rectangular boxes. It is a design worthy of the first satellite of the Paris Pompidou, whose futuristic glass, exposed pipes and industrial vents caused an uproar when it opened in 1977.
This time, the Pompidou wasn’t taking any chances; as soon as the design was adopted, the museum brought the townspeople along, explaining the unusual architecture, the materials, the construction. By the time it was finished, no one was prouder of the new museum than the people of Metz
(pronounced “Mess”).
After seven years in the making and 69 million euros (about $90 million at the time), it opened in May to five days of joyous celebration.
An international architectural team of Shigeru Ban (Japan),Jean de Gastines (France) and Philip Gumuchdjian (London) won the design competition among 157 competitors (Gumuchdjian dropped out before work began). Their complicated structure features three exhibition spaces: identical shoeboxshape rectangles, each 262 feet long, stacked on top of each other at 45 degree angles, the huge picture windows at their short ends dramatically framing different city landmarks, most memorably the gothic cathedral.
A fourth space, called the Grand Nave, is on the ground floor, another vast room with a wall that reaches almost 60 feet high for oversize artworks. Their combined area is more than 54,000 square feet, almost equally divided among the nave and the three galleries, and is the biggest temporary exhibition space in all France, Paris included.
The conical roof is a freestanding, waterproof fiberglass and Teflon membrane in what Ban describes as the shape of a Chinese hat he found in Paris. It is supported by latticed wood columns that rise to form the underside of the translucent roof. Rain collected on the roof runs down the outside support columns and is redistributed to the surrounding museum gardens.
The best perspective on the innovative architecture is from a high balcony above the top-most gallery; here you can see how the three boxes are stacked on top of each other, none touching the roof.
As you work your way through the galleries, past Matisses and Miros, Picassos and Pollocks, Dalis and Duchamps, you’ll pass hints of the Paris Pompidou in exposed pipes and the roofless, ground floor Nave. The homage is no accident; the outside terrace is the same size as the plaza in front of the Pompidou, and the hexagonal 77-meter-high elevator tower that rises through the building and pierces the roof like a mast references the year the Paris museum opened.
For its exhibitions the Metz satellite can draw on the Pompidou’s 65,000 works - Europe’s largest collection of modern and contemporary art. “We are a sister, not a child, of the Paris Pompidou,” said a museum spokesman. “We produce our own shows, we don’t run handme-downs from Paris.”
Lest the building steal the show, the new museum’s opening exhibit was an ambitious blockbuster: “Masterpieces?” (“ Chefsd’Oeuvres?”). Almost 800 works starting with the Middle Ages examined what, exactly, makes great art. Seven hundred of them came from the mothership in Paris, but perhaps to underline its independence, Metz borrowed the rest from other museums in France and elsewhere, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Aside from the new museum, the town of Metz is inviting for the legacies of its 3,000-year-long checkered history. Occupied by Celts, Romans, Franks and the Holy Roman Empire, it became part of France in the mid-17th century, was annexed by Germany in 1871 after the Franco-Prussian War, and flipped back and forth between them through the two World Wars. Metz sometimes seems like two cities.
FRENCH FLAVOR
The French presence permeates the pedestrian streets and squares in the old quarter around the cathedral; the medieval arcaded Place St. Louis, the former precinct of money changers; the elegant Esplanade gardens; the spacious Place d’Armes with its neoclassical town hall facing the gothic cathedral.The cathedral and its nave, one of the highest in Europe, contain notable stained-glass windows, from the original 14th-century beauties to three by Marc Chagall, made at different times between 1958 and 1968. Nearby, the Cour d’Or Museums house a large collection of Gallo Roman and medieval antiquities. (The Pompidou-Metz itself is on the site of a Roman amphitheater.)
The German legacy is the Imperial Quarter that fans out from the train station - a huge, neo-Romanesque extravaganza with a clock tower said to have been designed by Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. The area’s imposing Jugendstil (Germanic Art Nouveau) architecture, towers, street fountains and broad boulevards display Teutonic urban planning at the end of the 19th century.
Metz’s location on the German border, with Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands all within an hour’s commute, was a strategic factor in selecting it for France’s first major cultural satellite - that, and the new TGV (high-speed train) that connects Paris and Metz in a breathtaking 80 minutes.
The Pompidou-Metz joins other offshoots of major urban museums, among them branches of the Louvre rising in Abu Dhabi and in the French industrial town of Lens, but it has most in common with the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain. Like Frank Gehry’s iconic design, Metz’s hope is that its Pompidou will also lure visitors to a regenerated, relatively unknown city. Take it as a gesture of neighborly support or an omen of good things ahead that the mayor of Bilbao came to the museum’s opening ceremonies.
Now look for the Metz Effect.
Centre Pompidou-Metz,1 Parvis des Droits de l’Homme, centre pompidou-metz.fr, is closed Tuesdays. Metz is 80 minutes from Paris (Gare de l’Est) on the fast TGV train; there are 11 round trips daily. The museum is a two-minute walk from the train station.
For more information contact Atout France, the official French Tourist Office, at franceguide.com/us. The Metz Tourist Office staffs an information center, “Here and There,” at the museum. Its main office is at 2 Place d’Armes, close to the Metz Cathedral, tourisme.mairie-metz.fr.
Travel, Pages 58 on 12/12/2010