Carré d'Art

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Carré d'art designed by Norman Foster

The Carré d'art (literally: "Art Square") in Nîmes in southern France is a modern cultural center in the style of the Center Pompidou in Paris . It consists of a museum of modern art and a public library.

history

At the site of today's Carré d'art there was a theater building with a classicist stone facade, which opened in February 1800 and which was burned on October 27, 1952. The main facade, with its mighty colonnade , was to be preserved in the event of a new building, not least because of the neighboring Maison Carrée , an excellently preserved Roman temple from the first century BC.

In 1984 a competition among twelve invited architects, including Frank Gehry , Jean Nouvel and César Pelli , was decided in favor of the British architect Norman Foster . Foster's building opened in May 1993. In the end, despite numerous protests, the theater facade was not preserved; it was dismantled and reconstructed in the wild at the Caissargues motorway service station . Foster's glass front with its narrow steel pillars takes up the column motif of the neighboring Maison Carrée and the nine-storey cultural center respects the height profile of the square by lowering several storeys. The energetic meaningfulness of Foster's glass cube in the Mediterranean area was partly disputed.

  • The interior

  • The theater facade in 1980

  • The colonnade transferred from the city center to the green

business

The museum is recognized as the Musée de France . The collection includes 480 objects of modern art that were acquired from 1986. Special exhibitions are held regularly.

literature

Web links

Commons : Carré d'Art (Nîmes)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Theater Pieyre
  2. ↑ Project presentation by Foster and Partners ( Memento from February 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) (English)
  3. ↑ cf. Philippe Dagens report on relevant overheating problems in Le Monde from May 6, 1993
  4. ↑ La collection at carreartmusee.com

Coordinates: 43 ° 50 ′ 17 ″  N , 4 ° 21 ′ 18 ″  E