Palais de Tokyo by Thais Cshunderlick

PALAIS DE TOKYO

AR1AI040 Fundamentals Interiors, Buildings, Cities Precedent Research Tutor Catherine Visser Students Coen de Vries (4370074) ThaĂs Cshunderlick (4932706)

introduction Walking alongside the river Seine, or standing on top of the Eiffel tower, one will notice an outstanding public piazza with a monumental staircase surrounded by colonnades, a reflecting pool and a complex building with two separate wings. While approaching it, slowly becomes clear that, due to its monumentality and grand appearance, the space must have a sociopolitical or cultural use. While climbing the stairs one notices, by a quickly glimpse of the interior of the building through the long windows, that the right wing differs a lot from the left wing of the symmetric construction. Curious for what’s inside, one goes to the left and “Palais de Tokyo” tells the signage. Entering through a glass door, a brut reality appears: behind the stone-clad classicist façade, a naked, concrete-framed construction revealing the modernity of the place and, at the same time, the impression of getting inside a ruin. The interior of this Site de Création Contemporaine resembles a magnificent industrial wasteland with its openness and natural light. In combination with the gutted structure and the art pieces displayed, it gives the visitor sensorial and visual experiences in a Piranesian sense. For Zucker, definite structural organization and spatial relations, modified as they may be through destruction and age, still prevail and are still- through the maze of time - perceived as such. For us, as architects students researching about the history and renovation projects that this building went through in over 80 years of existence, a question arises: what is behind the minimalistic aesthetics and the architectural composition of Palais de Tokyo’s interior? In search of answers, the investigation was structured this way: first, in an attempt to understand what is the building, a review of its history, functions, floor plans and sections was made and a scale model was produced. Then, a extensive research about the architects, Lacaton & Vassal, involved in the renovations; their position in the project and the current interpretations of Palais de Tokyo. Alongside this, a literature review about the architectural theory on ruins and its aesthetic ambiguity on western society. Therefore, the resultant interpretation regarding the building gave us two concomitant lines of thought: an intentional one, due to the “incremental process” that the architects implemented on the design process and a theoretical one, related to the way that the building is currently read in Western society.

history of Palais de Tokyo Designed in 1937 for the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Modern, by the architectural team of Jean-Claude Donde, André Aubert, Paul Viard and Marcel Dastugue, the building known as “Palais de Tokyo” has housed several projects and institutions since then. It was built on the former Quai de Tokio (current Avenue de New York), North of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France. “The winning design for the project (...) combined a reinforced-concrete ‘freeplan’ (column-beam-slab structure), and the french tradition of palais architecture. The design sparked heated debate in the pages of modernist architecture reviews, which decried its academicism.” - Palais 15, p.23 Right from the start the building was made to house two separate museums: on the East wing the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (MAMVP) - owned by the municipality; and on the West wing the Musée national d’art moderne (where the Palais de Tokyo is to be found) - owned by the French State. From 1939 onwards, some of the works were moved and the troubled period of WWII prevented the complete opening of the West wing of the building. Most of the collections of the museum left the building with the opening of the Centre National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in 1977 and, with the remaining ones, in 1978 the West wing became the Museé d’Art et D’Essais.

Almost ten years later, in 1986, the building had a new purpose once again, the creation of the Palais de Cinema bringing together several institutions related to French cinema and photography. The project was abandoned in 1998 and on the following year, when the Ministry for Culture and Communication decides to consign part of the West wing building to the promotion of contemporary art, many parts of the interior had already been demolished due to extensive work for the previous project. For the opening of this center for contemporary artistic creation, in 2002, the architects Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal won the competition to renovate some of the indoor areas of the building. This short term project was supposed to last for three years but due to its success, it became a permanent institution. On the 10th anniversary of the Palais de Tokyo, a second phase of rehabilitation with Lacaton & Vassal allowed to open to the public the entire space.

the incremental process

renovations

According to the magazine Domus 847 (2002), the first renovation programme for the new space for contemporary aimed to “allow art to learn from other disciplines, such as design, cinema, literature, fashion and above all music”. The first joint directors of Palais de Tokyo, Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans, wanted an initial period with a dynamic and all-embracing vision of what a center for contemporary art can be. The intention was a new exhibition concept, somewhere between artist’s studio and gallery, to offer the visitors a less distanced, warmer contact with the artists of their time. To achieve those goals, Lacaton and Vassal, when designing the rehabilitation in this first phase, implemented a high level of flexibility to the building by restoring the original logic of spaces. This proposal for a minimal intervention, leaving the building much as it was, combined the architect’s philosophy - an antithesis of signature architecture - and the small budget available. The space that they had to work with includes a spacious glazed area, three lateral rooms and a large bay on the ground floor, together with a variety of other spaces on different floor levels. Nevertheless, the complexity of the original design had become almost unrecognizable after numerous alterations and deterioration. Jean-Philippe Vassal, when interviewed about his first impressions of the building, called it a “fragile shell”, a facade that had resisted as the sole remaining feature of the original building and a surprising interior with an industrial and incredibly contemporary quality. Him and Lacaton wanted to find inside something “from the outside”, and their references were in fact public spaces: the Djemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech, Morocco and the Alexanderplatz in Berlin, Germany. Those are loose spaces that are in constant flux, capable of accommodating frequent changes and that are redefined by their users with temporary or virtual boundaries. Working with this horizontal approach in the intervention, they did only the necessary minimal changes were made to improve access and safety, nothing too fussy, but very precise in its aesthetic choices. To make the building a real part of the city, very early in the design process, they opted for a surfeit of natural light and one of the pleasures of being there is that the visitor can see outside, contrasting to the sealed galleries of Paris. The building back then, worked with 8.000m², not much more than a third of the entire surface area.

2002

Since the opening in 2002 the new venue has made its mark in the Parisian art scene and for the second phase of the renovation, finalized in 2012, Lacaton & Vassal approach has not change. Originally, the museum was conceived in two axes, horizontal and vertical, and they wanted to regain that freedom of use and complexity of the play of spaces on different levels. In that sense, they aimed to make use of the entire surface area, 22.000m². Regarding the aim of freedom for the spaces, they suggested that the visitors wouldn’t need look for an entrance, they could just just walk anywhere and use the space anyway they wanted. Yet, since the 1960s, this freedom is an impractical utopia, since the entrance remained in the same place, as well as the security checks and paid-admission areas.

2012

On this vertical approach for the intervention, the pair of architects pointed as a important reference the Fun Palace of Cedric Price (1961). It was a visionary and radical proposal, which clearly challenged the traditional notions of conformed environment and built form. It proposed an architecture that was no longer merely static, but instead comprised of spaces in time that both informed and were informed by the complex social, economic and cultural changes of dynamic societies. Price proposed continually reprogrammable scenes and Lacaton & Vassal allegedly re-expressed the existing building to enable its own reprogramming. The image that the architects wanted was that of a dynamic of ebbs and flows. Vassal mentions as a strategy for the project: to design and imagine using tools from cinema. Considering that architecture consists of imagining the space around a person’s movement, it’s a strategy of collage or montage. They worked looking at fragments of space and adding them together.

Once again, the budget was not big and the new operation has completed the exhibition programme and creative spaces with specific areas, comprising cinema projection auditoriums, a concert hall, an outdoor terrace cafe, a bookshop and administrative offices. According to the magazine The Architectural Review nº1384 (2012), when asked about the live-in rawness of the interior, in the architect’s opinion: ‘there was never any question of taking an aesthetic position with respect to the unfinished, to the ruin’. “ In architecture, the esthetic is important but it’s a consequence of the working process. It’s an outcome. And if there exists an aesthetic in the Palais de Tokyo, it’s certainly not that of the walls left in their natural state. It’s rather the aesthetic that arises from the totality of the design work and now from its use.” Jean-Philippe Vassal “The Palais de Tokyo is an exhibition venue. The architect mustn’t overdo things in order to leave room for the artists and the works of art. Similarly, it seems essential to me to integrate the user’s role when speaking of the architect’s work.” Anne Lacaton

a ruin approach A ruin is mostly referred to as a building, abandoned, partly collapsed, often linked to the old Roman or Greek times. Temples, palaces, squares, basilicas and churches, all over the world ruins tell stories of old times and old societies. In architectural theory, the definition of a ruin is much broader and changed over time. Briefly one can say that, from the Renaissance onwards, ruins are given value because they hold a germ of what was and represent the passing of all things. They teach us things about their times, they inspire us and affect our consciousness of the present (Pimlott, 2016). Before those times, ruins were not kept in place, but more often plundered, occupied and built upon. Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) was the first to value ruins in another way, he tried to learn and ‘copy’ from the old buildings and used parts of their design, which he valuated the most, in his new designs. From this new interest in ruins a new pastime grown in Western-Europe: the so-called Grand Tour. This Grand Tour is a travel that young people had to make to be respected in cultural society, in which they visited the old - Roman and Greek - cities and buildings. As of the growth of this tradition, it increased the interest in their architecture, building methods and styles, and with that, the interest in ruins. One of the people that got inspired during his Grand Tour was Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), who started drawing, etching and engraving views of Rome, and later on his famous Carceri: imaginary prisons of the ‘old times’. In the making of these drawings he was not tempered by the borders of scientific, archeological knowledge. They are a bit chaotic and uncomfortable drawings that, by the more

intense use of perspective and shadows developed to be more dramatical over time (Delbeke et al, 2008). Piranesi was obsessed by the decay, the collapse of former greatness, glorifying the old, Roman, ruins and their grandeur in a way, for this fact, he can be seen as one of the predecessors of the 18th and 19th century poets in England, that also thought that the power of ruins was in their state of decay, their abandon (Pimlott, 2016). Piranesi and his love for ruins started off a new period, with a new vision on the use and meaning of ruins. Next to his appreciation of the state of decay, in this neoclassicism some architects and governments started to consider ruins as examples of magnitude and power. A wish to create architecture that could be as grand as the ruins and their magnificence arose; a wish to design buildings to represent the infinitude of the universe and the power of a civilisation that could dare to create such a monument (Pimlott, 2016). In later times, for example during WWII, Hitler and his head-architect Albert Speer got inspired by this philosophy and also built in this ‘spirit of evoking the illusion of the past’. It is to be considered that the Palais de Tokyo, with its’ grand and monumental appearance and setup was also built in 1937 with this idea in mind. In more recent times the ruin-typology and its symbolism expanded with multiple explanations and uses. On one hand a new movement in modern art is developing, starting in New York. Modern artists, due to their low budgets, live and work often in former light-industrial, innercity buildings. These places, called ‘lofts’, became an important source of inspiration in the design for residential spaces and cultural places. The popularity for using this ‘loft-style’ in cultural, mostly modern art, institutes and places can be explained as a way to let the visitor

interact with the art in a different way: when looking at the art in an environment that is the same as the surroundings where the art was made, the visitor is becoming part of the process of making. This ‘ruined’ or ‘as found’ places therefore were imitated very often for galleries and exhibitions in former-industrial buildings. Mark Pimlott states that the Palais de Tokyo is one of the contemporary editions of this theory: a contemporary monumental loft, where the viewer is becoming an actor in the production of the art, and by that transforms into a ‘cultural maker’. (Pimlott, 2016) Another ruin-like approach is that of the ruin as an object of reflection. An example can be found in the so-called ‘Beeldenstorm’, when the protestantism grew in the Netherlands and, in 1566, protestant people raged through catholic churches to destroy all the symbols, ornaments and other rich decorations these churches contained (Koster). This iconoclastic event is comparable with what more recently, in 2003, happened to the Palast-building in Berlin, that had been stripped of its’ representative materials and symbols after the fall of the GDR (German Democratic Republic). By handling a building like this, one gives the building a character of freedom, freedom of prescribed values and order. Regarding the aforementioned history of the Palais de Tokyo during the war, and its’ monumental appearance, it could be that the renovation led by the architects Lacaton & Vassal chose an iconoclastic treatment of the building to make the building an object of reflection on this time.

Mosley and Sara describe a more bold way of creating architecture with a message: the architecture of transgression. With examples like a flooded McDonald’s, a manual to construct walking buildings and an a living exhibition pavilion, they talk about transgression as going beyond the boundaries set by law, discipline or convention. To explain the role of architecture in this transgressive story, they define four categories of destabilising architecture: revolution, trying to change the way society works, Duchamp’s urinal, when a product or building leads to a paradigm shift, Cross-dresser, when an artist as a trans-disciplinary event makes architecture or vice versa an Carnival, a place or event where all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions are put aside, open for anyone who wants to participate. Especially the last category, the Carnival, is an interesting one to have a look at when analyzing the Palais de Tokyo and its (intentional or emerging) function in the city and society. Mosley states that the carnival introduces the notion of an architecture that transgresses the normative processes by suspending accepted approaches, procedures and hierarchies; in this works and buildings the temporary suspension of these norms allows one to revisit the understanding of those norms and recalibrate their meaning (Mosley et al, 2013). If we combine this to the architects’ reference of ‘Fun Palace’, we see a lot of similarities.

research experiment the model

Due to the complexity of the plans of the four levels and its mezzanines, it was decided to build up a model of Palais de Tokyo in the scale of 1:200 initially to understand better the spatial qualities of the building and to be able to demonstrate the big contrast between the classical, late Art Deco style facade and the roughness of the exposed concrete on the inside. As the pair of architects mentioned in interviews about the design project, they never saw the necessity of building a scale model, for them the project’s spaces were already visible. “In this precise case, it wouldn’t have shown anything in particular. It was more efficient to organize guided tours and explain on-site the things we were thinking of doing, accompanied by partial mock-ups.” Anne Lacaton

As researches of the project and for not being able to physically visit the building, by executing a scale model relying on plans and pictures of the spaces, it was our way of visiting the place, to go through a process similar to what the architects went through and to be nearest to â&#x20AC;&#x153;build the buildingâ&#x20AC;?. Considering open areas for the public - the exposition spaces - that go through the four floors, the model was built using contrasting materials to represent the difference of the interior and the exterior. The process of building the model was important to really perceive the spatialities, to have an idea of how the interior feels and to understand how the architectâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s intervention worked to make Palais de Tokyo what it is today.

conclusion In this research the different explanations, interpretations and the architects’ visions on the minimalistic appearance of Palais de Tokyo have been discussed. This contemporary art institute, placed in a grand, monumental building along the Seine, was renovated in two phases by architects Lacaton & Vassal. Starting with their own vision on the intervention, it was mostly driven by three directions: the available budget, the wish for a great flexibility and their two references for the two renovations (2002 and 2012). Combined with their statement that “the architecture was already there”, in other words, that the building as it was created a perfect starting point, these reasons give us an overview of what the architects’ intentions were. When looking at the ambience and appearance inside, one could say that it’s a raw, ruin-like space, especially with the monumental exterior in mind. In architectural theory a lot is written about this approach for buildings, that started from the Renaissance, when people started to value the ruin. This started with learning from and an appreciation for the different components of different ruins. In the period of neo-classicism, this developed to become a more specific theme when ruin-like and monumental buildings started to be examples of magnitude and power. Further in time the number of explanations and meanings given to buildings with symbolisms of the ruin grew: on one hand, a countermovement to the power-related ruin-architecture is growing, an iconoclastic approach that sees the ruin as an object of reflection. On the other hand, the typology of the loft as the place where art is made, started in New York, is becoming a symbolism for modern art institutes. Combining and comparing the two different storylines, the vision of the architect and the theoretical one, a few similarities appear. Next to that, the theoretical part extends the explanation with more background than the architect says to have intended. What is similar between the two is that Lacaton & Vassal designed their intervention with the loft-principle in mind, they wanted to make the place an environment that feels like a place of art production, instead of only the showing of art. What the theoretical part adds to the architects’ vision, is the iconoclastic, object of reflection-explanation and the direction of the transgressive architecture, the carnival. The first is experienced quite clear when entering the building from the monumental exterior. The second, the lack of hierarchy and sense of freedom, is, in particular after the second renovation, experienced by being allowed to go everywhere in the building, by not providing a specific routing or having a certain standard in art and by keeping the interior very raw and low-profile: everything is possible and everyone is welcome.

Remarkably this last point, the carnival-part, does play a big role in the architects’ main reference for the second phase of the renovation: the Fun Palace by Cedric Price. This means that the idea is related to the Palais de Tokyo from the beginning, but not mentioned in their interviews and articles. The reference of Fun Palace also summarize the theory about the Palais de Tokyo: Cedric Price mentions that the notion of time is important for architecture, and that one can’t and doesn’t know everything a building will be and will mean over time when designing it. For Lacaton & Vassals’ building this means that what they probably did out of necessity to stay within the budget, can be given a wider meaning nowadays by the buildings’ use and the analysis of this use.

pictures 1. View of the square where Palais de Tokyo stands. 2. Les musées d’art moderne. Vue d’ensemble. Dessin de Decaris. 3. Détail de la carte de l’exposition de 1937 (zone du Trocadéro et de la Tour Eiffel). 4. Plan and section of Palais de Tokyo after the first renovation. 5. Section of Palais de Tokyo showing verticality after second renovation. 6. Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, 1964. 7. New staircase on Palais de Tokyo. 8. Carceri Plate VII. The Drawbridge. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, 1745. 9. Lightbox-NY. Loft in New York, USA. 10. Palais de Tokyo in comparison with the loft. 11. Monumental appearance of the square. - Scale Model: 12. Overview. 13. Detail of second floor. 14. Representation of the façade. 15. The second floor.

bibliography DELBEKE, Maarten. Piranesi: de prentencollectie van de Universiteit Gent, 2008. Museum Boymans. Etsen van Piranesi 1720-1778, 1953. KOSTER, Paul. Wat is de Beeldenstorm?. Retrieved from https://npofocus.nl/ artikel/7575/wat-is-de-beeldenstorm MOSLEY, Jonathan; SARA, Rachel. The Architecture of Transgression: Towards a Destabilising Architecture. In: Architectural Design, v. 83, 2013. Special Issue: Architecture of Transgression, p. 14-19. PIMLOTT, Mark. The Ruin. in: The Public Interior as Idea and Project, 2016. p. 96-147. ZUCKER, Paul. Ruins: An Aesthetic Hybrid. in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 20, nº 2, 1961. p. 119-130.

MAGAZINES: Artforum International, Beyond relief, David Huber, USA, 2015, p. 344-347. ICON, Anne Lacaton: Housing and generosity, England, 2017, p. 103-106. Palais N°15, Comme un paysage sans limite/Like an endless landscape, David Cascaro, Claire Staebler, France, 2012. Domus N°847, Il Palazo del Popolo. Italy, 2002, p. 122-129. Domus N°959, Demolizioni espositive, Maria José Marcos, Gonzalo Herrero Delicado. Italy, 2012, p. 40-49. The Architectural Review N°1384, Fun Palais, Andrew Ayers. England, 2012, p. 44-51. World Architecture N°105, The art of today, Kieran Long. EU, 2002, p. 56-59.