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Metz, France
It's just a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection of a reflection
While I have been to Paris almost too many times to remember, I had never been to Metz and, to be brutally honest, why would anyone even want to go there? Sure it’s quick and easy to get to- the TGV Est gets you there in an hour and a half, covering a distance that would take an average New Jersey Transit Morristown Line train a good seven and a half hours (I did the math). It is located in the Lorraine part of Alsace-Lorraine, an area so close to Germany that just about every German with a conquering thought has made their way through here. It certainly is pretty, with rivers and historic buildings and lots of French people, but there are lots of places in France with all of those features. So why Metz?
Metz has a cathedral, a great big one, with one of the highest naves anywhere and supposedly more stained glass than any other cathedral. But still, lots of European cities have historic cathedrals. So, getting back to the real question, why Metz?
This seems a little more like it.
In addition to all of those 500 year old stained glass windows, there is a side chapel with windows by Marc Chagall, and that has to count for something. Still, there are lots of places to see Marc Chagall stained glass windows, places like Zurich and Nice as well as the Art Institute of Chicago and that wonderful little chapel in Tarrytown, New York. So that still leaves one question. Why Metz?
This is why I went to Metz.
The Pompidou Centre in Paris is more than a crazy building that is on the resumes of both Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, it is also home to a killer contemporary art museum which is easily one of my top five favorite museums anywhere. The museum is aggressively looking to open satellite locations across France and started first here in Metz, with a building designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban. Ban decided to create three long shoebox galleries, each rotated in a different direction in plan, and then covered the whole thing in a wooden lattice and tent structure that looks like a weird hat he found in Paris, an inspiration as random as just about anything ever in the history of mankind.
The whole building may be based on a hat (a hat!), but that doesn’t mean that it can’t result in some damn spectacular spaces. The entire tented room is not quite an interior space, there are open gaps to the outside and large ground level roll up doors that connect the lobby with the plaza, frustrating the hell out of the bag check security guard. The galleries are straight forward and kind of boring, although they each feature large windows that pop through the fabric and frame views of the city or the countryside. And in between there are balconies and overlooks to the wood structure and, in this case, to an easy to miss site specific artwork. This is “Echos d’ Echos: Vue Plongeantes, Travail in Situ” by Daniel Buren, a massive mirrored surface that makes a hard to read space even harder to read. And while the mirror and the hat may be intentional designs, chances are that the blue paper airplane down there is more of a crowd sourced addition.
In and around the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where the art was good but the building was better.
