Cité de l'architecture moche

I visited the Cité de l'architecture & du patrimoine, Paris' architecture museum, the other day. It's located in the Palais de Chaillot, one of the pavilions built near the Eiffel Tower for the 1937 Universal Exposition. The museum itself exhibits mostly plaster casts of architectural fragments like archways, columns and sculptures, along with some well-made architectural models.


... Writing the above start to this post felt perfunctory, and I guess I am having trouble feeling very enthralled over the Cité. I can say that a lot of the objects there were perfectly interesting, especially anything relating to the Middle Ages, of which there was a lot. The main exhibition hall is arranged as a series of rooms, arrayed along the curving plan of the de Chaillot, memorably separated by casts of various medieval church doorways from all over France. The casts throughout are very good and capture a surprising amount of detail, while many of the small-scale models are also neat. But I don't know, there was so much stuff---of the same tawny plaster colour, no less---that most of it blurred together after a while. In their original contexts (i.e. provincial churches, etc.), those fragments would have more presence since they'd be more unique in their respective locations. Brought together in the Cité, they risked losing their definition, although each one was worthwhile. But then again, isn't this the problem with most museums, where only very good curation saves the collected objects from drowning in each-other? 




I also realized that I just didn't like the red colour they'd used on the walls. It's not like I think that all museums should be white-walled, but there was just something about that particular shade of red in that space. Go figure.


The Cité offered its surreal moments, though, in the upstairs Paintings, Drawings and Murals Gallery (the only part of the museum where photos were allowed, not that I took many). First of all, it's very dark up there, in order to preserve the delicate works on display, I suppose. Second, there was practically no-one up there (the Cité as a whole is not the most well-visited Paris museum, although to be fair it is quite new). Finally, intentionally or not, this Gallery is laid out as a labyrinth. I wandered dark little passages and over random little staircases going from one medieval fresco to another. Occasionally I came across especially bored and lonely security guards, or a large room like the one where a big medieval frescoed dome interior was awkwardly juxtaposed over third-rate Modernist architectural drawings in strangely-arrayed display cases. Elsewhere, there were small re-created stone church crypts (located two stories above ground---?!) accessed via crisply-detailed, narrow, dark-grey corridors---kind of dream-like, definitely creepy, but without the sense of the sacred. 

The Modern Architecture section was one large space with a recreated apartment unit of Le Corbusier's Unité d'Habitation at one end. The Unité apartment was certainly nifty. The rest of the exhibit was composed of more architectural models, drawings, and videos of modern French architecture. There was a lot here that was represented, too, including many famous masterpieces, but there tended to be too few great works shown alongside many really awful examples of French post-war architecture. It gave me the impression that, with a few superlative exceptions, French modern architecture on the whole is quite disappointing. Either the architects here attempt self-indulgent formal "innovation" often only borrowing from trends originating elsewhere, or are obsessed with structural and technical exhibitionism that usually has inelegant results. Or sometimes they combine both. 


Again, it's not universally bad here, and France certainly isn't unique in suffering from hideous architecture. But it is still tragic that so many architects in such a beautiful and civilized country are seemingly incapable of anything that isn't ugly in intention or result. It's as though an extreme ideal of artistic-intellectual freedom promoted with much suavely empty rhetoric (all the architects in the videos talked splendidly) were exacerbated by professional arrogance and protected by ossified networks. All of which, of course, are the worst hallmarks of today's France in general. And it means that this country is not rising to the example set by its amazing history or to the challenge set by its considerable potential.


... Or maybe it was just how everything was presented at the Cité. I suppose it irritated me to wander amongst so many things torn out of their original contexts and put side-by-side, with little sense of hierarchy, value or user experience, in some pseudo-neutral vacuum. Go figure.