Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain by Foster + Partners, Turns 30
02/05/2023.
[Nîmes] France
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain by Foster + Partners. Photograph by Niguel Young.
Carré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain by Foster + Partners. Photograph by Niguel Young.
Project histoy description by Foster + Partners
Médiathèques exist in most French towns and cities. Typically they embrace magazines and books as well as music, video and cinema. Less common is the inclusion of a gallery for painting and sculpture. In Nîmes, the interaction within the same building of these two cultures – the visual arts and the world of information technology – held the promise of a richer totality. The urban context of Nîmes was also a powerful influence. The site faces the Maison Carrée, a perfectly preserved Roman temple. The challenge was to relate the new to the old, but at the same time to create a building that represented its own age with integrity.
The Carré d’Art is articulated as a nine-storey structure, half of which is cut into the ground, keeping the building’s profile low in sympathy with the scale of the surrounding buildings. At the heart of the plan is a glass-roofed atrium, with a cascading staircase, which references the courtyard vernacular of the region. This space exploits the transparency and lightness of modern materials to allow daylight to permeate all floors. The lower levels house archive storage and a cinema. Above are two library floors, with art galleries on the upper two levels. A reception space on the uppermost floor opens out to a shaded café terrace overlooking a new public square.
The creation of this urban space was an integral part of the project. Railings, hoardings and parked cars were banished and the space in front of the building was extended to create a pedestrianised place – a new social focus and an appropriate setting for the Maison Carrée. Lined with café tables and thronged with people, the square has reinvigorated the social and cultural life of Nîmes. Together with these urban interventions, the Carré d'Art shows how a building project, backed by an enlightened political initiative, can provide a powerful catalyst for reinvigorating the social and physical fabric of a city.
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of a high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
METALOCUS > 05.2017