Marseille: New Glass Designs for an Old Port

Villa Méditerrannée, a new building by Stefano Boeri, has an auditorium below the sea, but much if its exhibition space is suspended in mid-air.  This view leads to the towers of Marseille's 19th century multi-colored marble cathedral.

France's oldest city and one the great ports of the Mediterranean has been revitalized to become a European Cultural Capital of Europe this year.  Some of the most innovative practicing architects of today are making their mark on the city, cleaning up old areas and transforming it into an exciting new seaport environment.  Abandoned parts of the old port and places where immigrants first entered the city are in the process of being turned into new commercial areas, with restaurants, art galleries, museums, music venues and shops.

Marseille became a Greek city about 2700 years ago.  The
 island is where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned.

Sheaths of glass, concrete and metal, the materials of new architecture, butt up against the old stone towers, hills and masts of this port which geographically reminds me of San Francisco to a certain extent.  (Reminiscent of the Alcatraz, there's an island in the harbor containing Chateau d'If, where the Count of Monte Cristo was imprisoned.) Yet, the feeling inside is more rugged and grittier than San Francisco, with a multinational flavor.

Ricciotti designed MuCEM with
a ramp linked to Fort Saint-Jean

My photos taken last month showed the MuCEM (Museum of Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean) nearly finished, adjacent to the Villa Méditerranée.  The 236 square foot box building, right, will be the country's largest museum outside of Paris. In essence, the building has two facades, the glass covering and the concrete covering.  The outer covering is a dark blue concrete which I actually thought was made of steel/ it shields the glass and museum visitors from the intense Mediterranean sun.  The "lacey" outer face and "glassy" inner building and the two parts connect with a ramp.  A walkway also links the new building to the very old 12th century building and tower, the Fort Saint-Jean.

From another vantage point (Parc du Pharo), the 19th century multi-colored marble cathedral pops up behind the t concrete lattice patterns of the brand new Museum of Mediterranean Civilizations (MuCEM).

Architect Rudy Ricciotti's style has also raised eyebrows. He designed a floating gold roof on the Louvre in Paris to house the Islamic collection and a Jacques Cocteau museum in Menton.  Each building is quite different, though, unlike Frank Gehry's architecture.  MuCEM's concrete shell resembles a fisherman's net. Its concrete is blue-gray, but that color will change with reflections of light, water and the sun. Ricciotti calls the eight different lattice patterns "sun-breakers."  They are meant to shield the southern and western facade from intense sunlight.  MuCEM opened June 7, 2013.

A fishnet pattern of concrete
shields MuCEM from intense
sun on the south and west.

Next door is the Villa Méditerrannée, a product of Italian architect Stefano Boeri's design studio, and a building devoted to exhibiting Marseille's Mediterranean culture.   It has a huge, cantilevered roof, but below it is an area with a view into the sea basin.  The building's auditorium goes under the water, too.  The museum officially opened last weekend.  Its exhibitions and films visualize the present and the future of the sea.  Supported by the region of Provence-Alpes-Cote'Azur, Villa Méditerannée hopes to encourage communication among the many countries which have ports on the Mediterranean   It can be understood as an exciting new cultural center for the entire Mediterranean region. 

Another view of Boeri's Villa Méditerannée, with Ricciotti's MuCEM and Fort Saint-Jean to right.  Glass is used extensively in the new buildings to take
advantage of reflections of sun and water.

There are other new museums, including the Musée des regards de Provence, where the old health station had been and where immigrants first went as they entered Marseille. The museum has a Michelin three-star restaurant. 

There's a new museum of decorative arts and a fine arts museum at Palais Longchamp has reopened after being closed many years.  (That museum and the Musée Granet in Aix-en-Provence are hosting large exhibitions of the shares a major exhibitions of the many important artists who painted in the region, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, etc. In fact, Arles and other venues in Provence are sharing in the European Cultural Capital events.  The Palais du Pharo, on the shoreline of Marseille has a large sculptural exhibition of steel arcs by Berner Venet, in celebration of the events.) 

In the Parc du Pharo, the sculptor Bernar Vernet designed 12 steel arcs, called
Desordre, created a pattern of light and shadow against the shoreline.

Reflective glass creates is s museum without walls,
at FRAC, a regional museum of contemporary art.

It seems that all the contemporary architects working here--the local and the international ones--respect the city's very irregular seaport.  They design with the knowledge that water reflects light and that glass reflects water and light.  Multitudes of glass heighten the reflections many times over.

FRAC (Fonds regional d'art contemporain or the Regional Collection of Contemporary Art) opened in March, 2013.   The building has about 55,000 square feet.  Its the work  work of Japanese architect Kenzo Kuma. The exterior is covered with 1,500 panes of glass, all of which have been recycled and enameled in the workshop of Emmanuel Barrois.

Kenzo Kuma designed FRAC, a regional museum of
contemporary art

Kuma, like Ricciotti, is concerned with shielding the sun. (It's interesting that exhibition while I was there concerned environmental art.) The glass is hung and diverse angles, offset from the building at various places.  Kuma tries to evoke a museum without walls, and a feeling of openness prevails.  There is a beautiful, peaceful aura to his building, a feeling modern Japanese architects convey so well. Kuma also said that he imitated the flow of space learned from the study of Le Corbusier, a labyrinthine, interlocking flow of space.  

Le Corbusier, Cité Radieuse, 1947-52.  It has 347 apartments on 12 stories

Going to Marseille warrants a trip to the Cité Radieuse, Le Corbusier's masterpiece of modern architecture, formerly called l'Unité d'Habitation.  

Entrance to Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse
The ground floor rests on muscular "pilotis" made
of concrete, which hold up the building

His blueprint for modern living, completed in the 1950s, unifies all aspects of living, eating, school, doctors and recreation in one building. Unfortunately, there was a fire last year which harmed some units but most of the building is intact.  Many portions of the building have recently been painted and the colors make a brilliant splash reminiscent of Mondrian.  It's hard to go to the restaurant without disturbing clients or to visit one of the individual apartments without an invitation. 

The ground floor lobby radiates warmth and color

As much as I don't necessarily think architects should try to be sociologists who tell people how to live, but this building succeeded and the residents like it.  The concept and design were repeated again in Nantes, Berlin, Briey and Firminy.  Le Corbusier proved that the modern concrete  could be beautiful, colorful and expressive. Concrete, usually when reinforced with cast iron, need not be sterile.  

An art school is on the rooftop.  The
force of brutal concrete pushes
against the sky

The day we were there, a film crew was making a television commercial on the roof and all kinds of goods were set blocked off and set aside for film use.  It was May 22nd, and the sky was making some interesting cloud designs.  Like Antoni Gaudí, Le Corbusier made his ventilation shafts into expressive, sculptural forms.  The brutal, rough-hewn concrete has force and muscle which come alive against the muscle a alive against the sky.

The rooftop is a communal terrace and residents have a straight view to Marseille and the Mediterranean Sea.   We're left with the feeling that yes, Marseille is a city with muscle and it will be a force for 2700 more years.   

Notre-Dame de la Garde, perched high above
the old port, has protected the
boats for years

Construction was going on everywhere the other time I went to Marseille, in 2011. The photo below on the left, taken at that time, may represent a vista that's gone now.  It was on the other side of the port and opposite the church of Notre-Dame de la Garde.

Fishing and seafaring have always
been the business of Marseille. 

Boats, fishing and seafaring will continue for a long time, as long as we respect and protect our resources.

Looking Up: Skyscapes of the Civil War

Frederic Edwin Church, Meteor of 1860, is in the collection of Judith Filenbaum Hernstadt

Photos of the asteroid and a meteor which hit in Russia this past week reminded me of Frederick Edwin Church's painting of a meteor, now on view in the Smithsonian American Art Museum's exhibition, The Civil War and American Art.  This month we celebrate President's Day, Black History Month, and Spielberg's film of Lincoln in the Oscars, while the exhibition presents the historical and sociological aspects of the civil war as interpreted by artists of that time.   Many paintings and photographs on display tell those stories, but there's also a sub-theme of landscape as metaphor.  The scenery of two Hudson River School artists, Church and Sanford Robinson Gifford, present geological and astronomical wonders with deeper meanings.
  
Church's Meteor of 1860 connects to Walt Whitman's poem in Leaves of Grass, Year of the Meteors (1859-60).  While Whitman's poem spoke of John Brown's rebellion and the election of Abraham Lincoln, it also described "the comet that came unannounced out of the north flaring in heaven," and "the strange huge meteor-procession dazzling and clear shooting over our heads.  (A moment, a moment long it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;)  

Church painted two large meteors followed by a trail of smaller sparks whose trail runs parallel to the earth.  Like Whitman's description, his vision also appeared at night; it lit up sky in pink and cast a glowing reflection on the water.  He wrote about the event he had seen from his home in the Hudson River Valley, Catskill, New York on July 20, 1860.  Could he have seen this rare event as an omen?

Frederic Edwin Church, Natural Bridge, Virginia, 1852 collection of the Fralin Art Museum, University of Virginia

The earliest painting by Church in the Smithsonian exhibition is The Natural Bridge, Virginia, a geological formation in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, which George Washington had surveyed and Thomas Jefferson had owned at one time.  His painting pulls our eyes upward to the  meticulously painted detail of the rock against white clouds and a brilliant blue sky.  Another story is told towards the bottom of the painting, where a black man explains this geographic wonder to a seated white woman, putting him in the authoritative position.

Frederic Edwin Church, Icebergs, 1861, from the Dallas Museum of Art

In 1859, Church had traveled by boat from New York to Labrador in search of icebergs.  He exhibited one result,  Icebergs, in New York on April 24, 1861, two weeks after war had broken out at Fort Sumter.  Church responded to the national strife, renaming the painting The North—Church’s Picture of Icebergs, thus signaling his political stance. Church allocated all exhibition fees to a fund established to support the Union Soldiers’ Fund.  The large, impregnable iceberg is said to represent the North itself.  Church also may have wished to commemorate the Battle of Fort Sumter and signal his sympathies in another well-known painting owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Our Banner in the Sky.

Frederic Edwin Church, Cotopaxi, 1862, oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, Gibbs-Williams Fund, Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Fund, Merrill Fund, Beatrice W. Rogers Fund, and Richard A. Manoogian Fund. The Bridgeman Art Library

Church traveled worldwide in his exploration of nature, natural wonders and exotic landscapes.  In 1862, he painted the Cotopaxi volcano in Ecuador.  Volcanoes are frequently seen as harbingers of war and upheaval.   Frederick Douglas had said in 1861, "Slavery is felt to be a moral volcano, a burning lake, a hell on earth."  Cotopaxi, along with Icebergs, is one of the four large paintings which may be seen as allegories of the causes and events of the Civil War.

Church, Aurora Borealis, 1865, in the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Church painted the northern lights in 1865 based on sketches provided by explorer Israel Hayes' sketches from a voyage to Labrador.  Aurora Borealis is an expansive view of nature in blue, green yellow, orange and red.  The halo of lights makes the sky look grand, while a boat shrinks next to its magnificence.    Generally the northern lights were interpreted as omens of disaster, but fortunately the war ended during the year in which it was painted.

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara Falls, 1857, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

There are other important paintings by Church in Washington, DC, including the National Gallery's El Rio de Luz.  The Corcoran Gallery of Art owns Niagara Falls, 1857, above.  During the 19th century, lithographs of this painting circulated the country at a time when travel was not easy and photography was not widespread.  It's worth going to the Corcoran to see the painting.  A gorgeous rainbow rises through the mist and spray, but is only visible by surprise when one stands in front of the real painting, not computer reproduction.  Frederic Church can be thanked for painting and interpreting the art of nature and for reminding us of mother nature's greatness.