If the request made by Culture Minister Rachida Dati to Société Foncière Lyonnaise (SFL) the day before yesterday, Thursday 18 April, is acted upon, it is a welcome one. This developer is in charge of restructuring the former Louvre des Antiquaires, which will soon house the Fondation Cartier. A few days ago, however, many people were stunned to discover that a particularly ugly glass canopy (ill. 1 and 3 to 6) had been installed on rue Saint-Honoré, damaging the façade of this building just a stone’s throw from the Louvre and the Palais-Royal.
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- 1. The canopy in rue Saint-Honoré
(current state)
Photo: Didier Rykner - See the image in its page
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- 2. La résille installée en 2004 sur l’immeuble de Georges Vaudoyer rue Saint-Honoré par l’architecte Francis Soler avec la bénédiction du ministère de la Culture
Photo : Jean-Pierre Dalbéra / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 - See the image in its page
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- 3. The project as presented
by the Jean Nouvel studios - See the image in its page
Just across the road, twenty years ago, it was the Ministry itself that was vandalising the building where it was preparing to relocate some of its departments, including the Heritage Department (ill. 2). Georges Vaudoyer’s beautiful building was thus damaged by the administration theoretically responsible for protecting it. The minister responsible was Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres.
How is it possible that the architects of the Bâtiments de France in Paris could once again authorise such devastation in almost the same place? The architect of this project is none other than the Jean Nouvel studio, and we know that Nouvel is capable of both the best - the Louvre Abu Dhabi - and the worst, particularly when he attacks historic monuments (just think of the Lyon Opera, a superb 19th-century building that was completely massacred in the early 1990s).
The Minister of Culture therefore sent a letter to the Chairman of SFL to inform him that, having been alerted to the work, which was taking place almost under her windows, she had asked her departments to check whether the authorisations given when the building permit was submitted in July 2018 had been complied with. The visual we were able to find on the internet (ill. 3), showing this project, was already not very beautiful and should have been refused. Françoise Nyssen was the minister at the time. What has been done is objectively much worse.
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- 4. The canopy in rue Saint-Honoré
(current state)
Photo: Didier Rykner - See the image in its page
For the Ministry’s findings are damning: three "points of divergence and non-conformity" between the project and the result were noted.
Firstly, the transparency of the canopy, as stated in the planning permission, was not achieved. As you might expect, glass is not transparent, let alone invisible, as we said recently in connection with the project to extend the Notre-Dame choir organ (see article) and the construction of the Triangle tower (see article). It is at best translucent, which is a very different thing. To believe that this canopy (whose usefulness is hard to fathom) would be virtually invisible shows a rather distressing naivety.
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- 5. The canopy in rue Saint-Honoré
(current state)
Photo: La Tribune de l’Art - See the image in its page
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- 6. Detail of the canopy
Photo: La Tribune de l’Art - See the image in its page
In addition, "the thickness of the glass support profiles is greater than the sections stated in the application", and "the gutters installed in the lower part of the glass roof" are much larger than in the planning permission, creating "a continuous horizontal line that disrupts the reading of the building". These findings by the Ministry of Culture are factual: what has been built does not comply with what was authorised.
Finally, the ABF had specified in its opinion (which, it should be remembered, is compliant, meaning that it is binding on the developer) that "with regard to the impact of the project on its environment, a prototype of the joinery and canopy, as well as samples of the materials, will be presented before implementation". While the joinery prototypes were indeed presented, this was not the case for the canopy, which the ABF discovered almost by chance while it was being installed.
For all these reasons (and just one would suffice), the Minister is expressly requesting that the structure be removed as soon as possible. We take the liberty of advising the Société Foncière Lyonnaise, and also the Fondation Cartier, to abandon this useless and unsightly canopy, even in terms of the visual aspect of the project. This will save them money and time, and spare Parisians a new wart.
Let’s also make a suggestion to the Ministry of Culture: twenty years after the installation of this horrible mesh on the Bons-Enfants building, isn’t it time to remove it and restore the building in which its services are supposed to be looking after the heritage to its... heritage character.