Art Under the 'Chinese Hat': The Lofty Ambitions of the New Centre Pompidou-Metz

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A white cloud, a wind-swollen sail or an undulating tent? The building with the rolling roof is the new Centre Pompidou-Metz (CPM), a three-year, €70 million ($89 million) project that opens Tuesday after a long wait. And people don't know quite what to make of it.

With its Teflon-coated roof resting on a delicate lattice of pliable wood and its 77-meter-high (250 feet) flag pole shooting out from its roof, the building could be mistaken for a UFO on its launch pad. Other critics have described it as resembling more of a "Smurf Hut."

But Shigeru Ban, the Japanese architect who co-designed the building with his French associate Jean de Gastines, thinks of it more as a "Chinese straw hat."

As the Tokyo-born and -based architect describes it, the inspiration for the structure came from the traditional pointed hat of bamboo and oiled paper worn by Asian field workers for protection against rough weather, like the one he found while walking through a flea market in Paris.

No matter what you think the roof looks like, though, the art center is destined to become the emblem of Lorraine's tiny metropolis, an architectural attraction and a symbol of economic change in northeastern France.

Part Urban Renewal, Part Tourist Attraction

Ban's building offers 5,000 square meters (54,000 square feet) of exhibition space, and the cathedral-like dimensions of the ground floor make it possible to hang extremely large works. The building itself is joined by an outdoor garden, a courtyard, an auditorium, a 200-seat event studio and, of course, a restaurant, cafe and museum shop.

The center is also the first satellite branch of Paris' renowned Centre Pompidou. The Louvre also has a satellite facility in the far northern French town of Lens (Pas-de-Calais) in the works. The point behind such moves is to make cultural masterpieces available to audiences beyond the French capital.

This plan will most likely be successful given the fact that the art center will have access to the seemingly endless collection of its Parisian parent institution. But the center's sophisticated design of three floors, each a box rotated by 45 degrees and placed upon the other, doesn't work like a museum in the traditional sense -- with collections, acquisitions and cumbersome logistics. Instead, it functions as a platform and a multi-purpose stage for a variety of art and exhibition formats. "Our goal is to create its own history in the heart of a region at the junction of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany," says Laurent Le Bon, the director of the CPM. "Of course, there will be exchanges with the Centre Pompidou-Paris, but we will not simply exchange exhibitions between Metz and the capital."

A Stunning Cross-Section of Modern Art

To begin that history, the art center has put together a mega-show that promises to even beat the visitor record of its parent institution in Paris. Le Bon, a rising star among curators, has assembled a show entitled "Chefs-d'oeuvre?" a survey of 780 masterpieces from the Pompidou-Paris, the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, the Quai Branly Museum, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and Switzerland's Beyeler Foundation.

It's a didactic selection that investigates the question of what constitutes a masterpiece. Beginning with the etymology of the term "masterpiece," Le Bon has staged a mind-boggling exhibition of juxtapositions: a Matisse next to a medieval ivory jewel box; an Australian bush drum next to Balzac's walking stick. As Le Bon describes it, the show provides a chronology that documents the transition from the "artistry of crafts to the artistic expression of the creative individual." The exhibition ends with clips of René Clair films next to one of Alexander Calder's mobiles and the large-scale abstract motifs of Joan Miró.

On the floor above, the exhibition expands into a veritable encyclopedic collection of works by prominent modernists -- including Dubuffet, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Picasso, Man Ray, Malevich and Chagall -- which are interspersed with posters, books, drawings, videos and film clips from Méliès, Hitchcock and Tarantino.

Overall, Le Bon has assembled a stunning cross-section of modern art. The only drawback, though, is that the mass of works on display competes with Ban's stunning architecture -- and you have to go all the way up to the third floor to get a panoramic view of the city.

A Masterpiece in Itself

Le Bon already has 15 potential projects for the art center in his sights over the next three years, paced at a brisk four-to-six exhibitions a year. The all-star curator hopes that the new Pompidou will give the capital of Lorraine, which was once the heart of an industrial region, an economic boost. "Metz no longer has any blast furnaces in the city center, but only a cathedral," Le Bon says. "Metz is a green city."

For the first year, Le Bon expects 200,000 visitors to pass through the Pompidou-Metz's doors. Given the favorable reception of the inaugural exhibition, the center should meet its expectations.

But the building, with its translucent roof, is alone worth a trip to the city: The "Chinese Hat" is a masterpiece in itself.