Drownout France

Public Arts

Public Arts

Columns under the El. 18 Juin.

At boring stretches of highway, where California-style flower-intersections create swirls of concrete and road, the French hire painters to put huge murals on the walls. At the interchange where the autoroute at the edge of Valbonne (down south) reaches Cannes there were massive, colorful landscapes on the highway walls. The only comparable thing I can think of in the US is Ladybird Johnson's highway flowers project. Vividly naturalistic that, but there is a fuller notion of art, urbanism, nature and human life on those painted highway walls.

Take a look at this stretch of elevated Metro in Paris, at Quai de la Gare. The columns that hold up the rail track are (in Bush 43's words) "grecian". Compare to the elevated tracks at 125th Street in Manhattan, where huge futurist girders soar 100 feet above ground, painted silver and cross-hatched with the diagonals of heavy iron supports. The building there is the station house itself, where inexpensive brick has been arranged into an interesting pattern of color.

At a particularly immense interchange, at Metro Montparnasse Bienvenue, there's an airport-style corridor that just goes forever. They've put in moving walkways and it still takes a while. But all along the long tube there are huge illustrations, Metro-agency installed art and photographs, a long historical timeline of the metro and Paris history, and so on. Think even of American airports: you'd usually find some lame faux-museum exhibit on the history of the local Native Americans (San Francisco International airport domestic terminal) or an endless and mind-numbing series of lightbox ads for consultings companies that "think at the speed of thinking" and so on.

Posted by amol at June 19, 2002 11:36 AM