The Cité des Sciences at La Villette is the first of Mitterrand's Grands Projets to be finished. Reyner Banham explains how its vast spaces were created out of an abattoir and suggests that the building takes High-Tech another step, albeit a conventional one, towards civic architecture
Originally published in AR December 1986, this piece was republished online in June 2022
All Paris seems to be agreed that the Cité des Sciences et de l'lndustrie at La Villette has turned out to be an immense and immediate success. There also seems to be a solid consensus that it is also, in some way, 'the next logical step after Beaubourg' – but that proposition seems to beg a couple of important questions. As far as the display and housing of scientific and technical material in an appropriate setting are concerned, it may be more of a consolidation than an advance. Since it was not originally purpose-designed as an exhibition hall, it poses problems – of scale, most conspicuously – that make severe demands on the ingenuity of installation designers, and they are clearly being tempted to fall back upon the presently established routines of museum display as a safe way out of trouble.
And as far as the absorption of High-Tech into the general body of what used to be called 'Civil Architecture' is concerned, the stride that Adrien Fainsilber's competition-winning design appears to have made is undoubtedly a long one ... but in which direction? Forwards, backwards or even sideways? The case is complicated, and what follows is only one of a number of possible interpretations of what now stands upon the site-ironically, the only one of the surviving Grands Projets of its generation to emerge from the present wave of financial retrenchments more or less complete, even though it was not designed from scratch for its present cultural purposes.
The story of the origins of this enormous structure, more than three times the size of Centre Pompidou, is too well known to need more than an outline here. Suffice it to say that the basic frame was the world's largest architectural white elephant, the bare and uncompleted hulk of what was to have been the most up-to-date metropolitan abattoir in the history of abattoirs, before it was realised that the advent of the refrigerated truck had made it unnecessary to bring live cattle into the metropolis for slaughter. Work was halted in 1974, and it was not until 1980 that the present project was initiated as part of Fainsilber's essentially Beaux-Arts plan for the whole site, only to be partly superseded by Bernard Tschumi's resolutely AA-School design for the amenagement of the new Parc de La Villette in 1982. This left Fainsilber in command only of the area north-west of the canal, and therefore the monumental axis that he had intended the Cité des Sciences to bestride, runs only as far as the géode, the almost-perfect reflecting sphere containing the almost-mandatory 'Omnimax' vertigo-for-the-masses movie experience that seems to come with every science museum these days.
Even though the gigantic entrance lobby of the Cité remains part of the public access route traversing the whole site, the building must now be considered more or less in isolation, as a free-standing object in its own right, the triumphant transformation of an unborn skeleton into a major organ of Gallic culture. The skeleton consisted of four rows of twinned seven-storey high columns carrying monstrous trusses that clear-spanned over four spaces, each of which was only slightly smaller than the plan of Centre Pompidou. The potential for disaster or success was commensurate with the sheer dimensions of the given skeleton, and the general effectiveness of Fainsilber's solution seems to derive from a decent humility in the face of this immensity, combined with scenographic and architectural skill of a high but – it must be said – entirely conventional kind.
How conventional Fainsilber's basic parti truly is, can be seen by comparing it with imaginable solutions by, say, Richard Rogers or Frank Gehry; the Rogers version leaving the floors unpenetrated and moving all circulation and services to the exterior of the perimeter glazing, Gehry making a series of diagonal 'interventions' (in the manner of his Pirelli project) that would erupt unpredictably on the exterior. Fainsilber's intervention, by contrast, is internal, symmetrical and orthogonal – a vast toplit four-storey 'stairhall' – and ultimately Neo-Classical in inspiration, as the occasional plaster busts of great thinkers on the upper galleries emphasise.
It is precisely the kind of central feature that one would expect to find in any major capital city museum from Schinkel onwards, even if traditional stairs have been replaced by escalators and the general effect of all that exposed structure and mechanical services at this scale is irresistibly to recall the kind of hypertech missile-hangar that gets blown up at the end of every James Bond movie. As sheer modern theatre, this is the design at its most overwhelmingly convincing; where it seems less so is in matters like the three multistorey 'glass-houses' added to the southern face of the structure, which serve ultimately to clutter the image of the building as a simple Classical pavilion, such as one sees it on the other facade.
Fainsilber's original proposals for La Villette site
The powerful image of that north-western elevation derives, again, from its fundamentally conventional nature. In spite of the unusual shapes in detail of the main carrying and spanning members, this remains a post and beam (post and truss, if you prefer) system of the most reassuringly familiar type, calm and comprehensible at first glance. It needs to be, for the sheer dimensions are far from familiar in institutions of this kind. At over 270 m, the facade just fails to be twice the length of Pompidou, but the length is difficult to read because there are no adequate or tellingly placed elements by which the eye can scale it. The end elevations are less inscrutable in this way; there are vehicle ramps and other comprehensible elements that make it possible to compare, again, with Pompidou and to see that these short facades at La Vilette are almost as extensive as the long ones at Beaubourg!
However, those ramps are not there to ease the aesthetic discomforts of architecture-buffs but to provide fire-brigade access to two service roads that penetrate the full length of the structure, at what may be construed as first-floor level. The presence of these emergency routes would effectively take that floor out of the public domain, anyhow, but the whole of that level is given over to environmental services and building management, including the computer room (and thus makes that floor, which the public will never see, alas, the most instructive exhibit of science and technology in the whole building).
‘It is notable that the further away one gets from purely parochial and Parisian standards of comparison, the less it seems to have to do with the extremist tradition of Pompidou’
And it is the need to by-pass that level in raising visitors from the entrance to the second floor (the first main exhibition level) without excessively steep escalators, that 'justifies' the sheer extent of the great lobby – in a smaller space the escalators would have to be scissored across one another, or something similar, which might give some complexity but would be a mean contradiction of the expansive nature of the whole. Of course, there would be room and more to hang escalators all over the outside of the structure, Pompidou-style, but that is not Fainsilber's style, which is to internalise all functions and services. And if not everything that he has internalised is as successful or as exhilarating as the great lobby, it is all interesting, thought-provoking, and part and parcel of the ultimate personality of the Cité.
This is conspicuously true of the ductwork, largely designed by the English contingent on the Fainsilber team, which is among the most spectacular elements of the whole building. Presumably because of the time-pressure of ‘fasttrack’ designing, the opportunity was not takenn to provide more direct routes for the ducts, some of which are very massive and numerous, like the smoke-extracts from the basement car-parking, which rise clear and upright through the main spaces, but then have to lurch from the vertical to avoid the truss-war before finally exhausting through the roof. Only purists, no doubt, would seriously object to this usage; for most visitors it is all part of a joyous Romanticism of Servicing, whose almost Baroque richness and theatricality makes even the most explicit work of, say, the Rogers office look very stiff-lipped and Anglo-Saxon by contrast.
The same is not true, alas, of the other most conspicuous environmental devices. the two lightcontrolling oculi in their spider-web suspensions that form the roof of the great lobby, fully mechanised, rotatable and equipped with adjustable reflectors to direct the light wherever it is needed in the vast spaces below. Elegant enough in its own right the structure is visually too spidery, the reflective elements visually too small to match the vastness of the space below, and they look like afterthoughts designed by a team (Peter Rice, Martin Francis, Ian Ritchie) who had become so involved in the ingenuities of their devices that they had not observed the scale of their setting .And their structure for the glass walls of the three external glass-houses seems to suffer the same visual fault. Though Peter Rice makes an issue for the need for readability at very different viewing distances the tracery of suspending and bracing filaments still looks out of scale, whether seen from near or far. However, the Rice team is not alone In this predicament; all the exhibition structures so far installed suffer the same kind of visual inadequacy and are dwarfed by the spaces in which they are installed. At the close range of vdu's to be viewed intensely or controls to be manipulated hands on this is no problem, and one can ‘participate oneself’ with the exhibits comfortably for hours, but as soon as one stands back to view the whole scene, even the complex and confident structures designed by Alan Stanton and Michael Dowd for the Exploration exhibits tend to shrink towards insignificance.
Since Stanton and Dowd (and Rice and Ritchie) are, in a very direct sense, members of the Pompidou inheritance, their cases return us to the questions with which we began. Is it true that the Cité des Sciences et de l'lndustrie and the Centre Nationale d' Art Contemporaine Georges Pompidou are both – in the words of Marie-Christine Loirier in the February/ March issue of Techniques et Architecture: ‘porteurs d'une esthétique mécaniciste née des Hautes Technologies industrielles des années 70’ and that ‘ils présentent des similitudes de langage architectural, et s'expriment structurellement’?
Confronting and using both buildings on the same afternoon, I was forced to conclude that the ‘expression’ of the Cité is really no more than simply structural, its aesthetic owes much less to the high technologies of the ’70s, and the resulting architectural language is only most superficially similar to that of the Centre Pompidou, which is so many other things (circulation, services) besides the merely structural, and remains, for better or worse, a far more radical design-from which the Cité must be judged a retreat. It may, indeed, be one of those ‘steps backward but upward’ that one hears about in times of intellectual retrenchment, but it still remains a distinct step backward, both in terms of architectural conception and museography. It belongs securely – more securely – even than Stirling's Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart – within the grand old European tradition of museums as monumental Classical pavilions with closed exteriors and ceremonial spaces hollowed out of their interiors.
It may well be that it has revitalised that tradition by its self-assured recourse to modern environmental technologies and their expression as a form of contemporary interior decoration. In many ways it is a building that would look entirely at home in Canada, the homeland of the decorative duct, and it is notable that the further away one gets from purely parochial and Parisian standards of comparison, the less it seems to have to do with the extremist tradition of Pompidou, and the more to do with the comfortable traditions of what might be termed ‘acceptance Modernism’. That, indeed, is the secret of its success both with the general public and the architecture-buffs. It shows us nothing that we have not seen before, and thus gives us mental room to admire its detailing and to revel in its copious delivery of those greatest of all modern luxuries, sheer space and plentiful light.
To see the building at its best one will always have to go to those empty areas of the interior that have not yet been colonised by exhibits, where nothing can distract from contemplation of the hectares of untroubled floor-space, the text-book clarity of the structure, the multi-storey walls of glass ... and the sheer unalloyed hugeness of volumes where everything (to mangle the words of Parisian Modernism's first hero, Charles Baudelaire) is ‘luxe, calme et technicité’.
