La Ville Chinoise à la Cité de l'architecture
What does it all mean ?
Yesterday I paid a visit to the newly renovated Cité de l'Architecture in Paris. An amazing rabbit warren of rooms, spaces and corridors with some interesting exhibits...but a rather puzzling approach to the temporary exhibition; at the entrance we took, the guard looked at us rather bewildered when we asked about it and said it was at the other end of the building...and we'd have to walk all the way through to buy our tickets (why we couldn't buy a ticket at that entrance remains a mystery).
Once into the exhibition, the next challenge was to understand exactly what the architects and curators were trying to say. Something about mutating Chinese towns...but the hotch potch of photos, objets, and films were a so totally mixed it was difficult to understand exactly what we were supposed to try and read into them. Moreover the texts and titles relative to the different exhibits were so small and difficult to read one tended to give up rather than try and decipher them. Each town was clearly indicated by chinese characters and the town's name beamed onto the floor so at least we knew where we were.
From photos of workers and their families through the years, to odd copies of terracota soldiers or dragons...to films and photos of towns...I couldn't really see how this exhibition took an architectural approach to the changing landscape of Chinese cities.
Yet another conceptual concept conceived by conceptually minded architects ?
Perhaps I totally missed the message. But one question I asked myself is how good at are artists (or architects) at communicating properly...surely the aim of this museum is to take a more open and understandable approach to architecture in order to share it with the uninitiated layman like me who would like to learn more?
This being said, it's worth a visit, if only for the one object I really marvelled at which was a massive 3D model of Beijing.
Ecrit par Caroline
le Dimanche 13 Juillet 2008, 02:42
dans "Innovation & ideas"
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