2023-11-08 14:09:12
Kilometers and kilometers of underground network. A pulsating labyrinth of tracks, tunnels and stations. A real underground city that runs, vibrates and pulsates day and night under the feet of the inhabitants. It is much more than a simple infrastructure functional to mobility Paris Metro: since its origins it has been a sort of parallel world in which engineering, technology and aesthetics interact and merge to generate an urban imaginary unique in the world. The exhibition Metro! Greater Paris on the movefrom November 8, 2023 at the Cité de l’Architecture et du patrimoine of Paris, ptakes inspiration from the construction sites currently open for the Grand Paris Express project to intersect the history of technology, visionary projects and the fictional universe linked to the subway, projecting the visitor into a new mental map of the great Paris.
The construction sites for the Place de L’Opéra station which saw the confluences of three lines of the Parisian metro in a 1903 photo kept at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris (photo Paris Musées)
The history of the Metro begins in the French capital in the mid-nineteenth century, when the city administration, to decongest surface traffic, began to think about an underground train. However, it took another half century for the project to be implemented under the pressure of the imminent Universal Exhibition: the first line was inaugurated on 19 July 1900 and the success was such as to induce an acceleration of the works. On the eve of the Second World War the system included 14 lines (159 km long and 332 stations), but development became even more intense in the post-war periodwhen little by little the network extends to connect the entire Parisian suburbs in a capillary manner.
The Villejuif Institut Gustave-Roussy station is located in the Hautes-Bruyères park, it will connect two future lines: the southern extension of line 14 and the new 15 south (photo Société du Grand Paris)
In 1998, with the opening of the driverless line 14, the Paris Metro entered the era of full automation. The exhibition, curated by a prestigious figure in European architecture such as Dominique Perrault (his is the National Library of France, which won him the Mies van der Rohe prize in 1996), tells this story, and does so with the ambition of taking the visitor on a journey through time and space. «This is not an exhibition about the subway», Perrault tells us, quoting the famous painting by René Magritte.
Dominique Perrault is the curator of the exhibition Metro! Greater Paris on the movefrom 8 November at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris (photo Enrique Pardo)
And need: “Rather, it is the story of the transformation of a metropolis through the prism of the evolution of its transport infrastructure. Different artistic disciplines such as architecture, design, illustration or cinema have mobilized to tell the story of the passage, from one century to the next, from a Paris that had two million inhabitants to today’s Greater Paris which has twelve million.”
But what difference is there – we ask him – between planning an exhibition and working on an architectural project? «These are two distinct approaches» he replies, «because an exhibition, unlike a building, has an ephemeral nature. In both cases, however, the challenge is to be able to project an original and committed perspective on a given problem and then translate this vision into an experience, both intellectual and sensorial, to be offered to the user of a building or the visitor of an exhibition”.
THE EXHIBITION Margaret Calvert, woman at work; the woman who showed the way to the English by NINO BRISINDI 18 October 2020
Metro! is divided into five sections that try to highlight how the Paris metro network differs from those of London or New York due to its impressive density, inherited from Baron Haussmann’s 19th century urban plan. «This dense network», Perrault continues, «gives Paris a particular character, a specificity whereby everything that is there and that gives shape and body to the city is almost always immediately nearby and easily accessible».
The milling machine for the Florence tunnel, line 17, named after the engineer Coquand, promoter of the Grand Paris Express (photo Gérard Rollando – Société du Grand Paris)
Among the 68 stations currently under construction, Perrault and co-curator Francis Rambert have chosen to highlight sixteen, believing them to be representative of the contextual typologies that connect the network, from landscape buildings to stations that, in an almost Piranesian movement, dive into the ground or create landmarks in the city.
Kengo Kuma’s Saint Denis station project. It will be one of the largest on the new network, it will transport 250 thousand people and will have a surface area of 34 thousand m2 with shops and cultural facilities (photo Kengo Kuma – Associates – Société du Grand Paris)
Among the sections that make up the exhibition, Perrault confesses that he is very attached to the one dedicated to cinema: “To design Metro! it gave me the opportunity to watch some films that chose it as a setting. I would have liked to be one of the accomplices in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part or help Audrey Hepburn hide in one of the stations filmed by Stanley Donen in Charade, but above all I would like that when walking through the exhibition, visitors felt the same energy as Jean-Paul Belmondo climbing, in a frantic chase, onto the roof, in Henri Verneuil’s Peur sur la ville.”
Hitchcock in the bedroom by GIANNI CANOVA 04 November 2020
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