Musée des Beaux-arts Ville de Reims, France Museum Building, French Architecture Design

Musée des Beaux-arts Reims

Reims building, France design by X-TU Architects

11 Apr 2012

Musée des Beaux-arts Reims Building

Location: northeast France

Design: X-TU, Architects

Architects: X-TU – anouk legendre + nicolas desmazieres
Project Chief: Sylvain Raillard
Team: Gaelle Le Borgne, Joan Tarragon, Stefania Maccagnan, Soo mi Kim, Pierre-Arthur Thibaudeau, Laurent Dubuis

Client: Mairie de Reims
Location: Reims, north east France
Program: Competition for the Arts Museum of Reims
Total floor area: 13,700 m² SHON
Cost: 35,000,000 €
Competition: 2012

Musée des Beaux-arts Ville de Reims Building News

“A city’s fine arts museum is essential to its identity. It is its cultural anchor! ”

This fascinating site is predestined to receive this museum.
Over the centuries, the city limits have constantly oscillated around this point:
the “Porte de Mars” which was the entrance to the city. When we look at the fluctuations in the lines of the fortifications in the historical period, we can see this oscillation very well.
The door is persistence … This is the anchor point!

images from architects

The excavations testify to this vibration of the city, around the door. They draw a palimpsest cut in the stone of the square. The museum is born from this archaeological origin: its high and low halls follow the profile of the excavations, its steps lead to the bottom of the moats, archeology becomes the museum’s event scene! The large mirror behind the hall bleachers is a mess.

The volume anchors the site. This is the new March gate! Unitarian, it refocuses this heterogeneous Vertical environment, it expresses itself as a counterpoint to the Halle du Boulengrin Courtois, he composes with it, gives it to be seen, And its forms curve, in reverence to the Halle, Halle and Museum thus dialogue on either side of the square, Surrounding the “Field of the Origins of the city” up to the old Roman gate!

The volume expresses the oscillation of the origins: it is a curved “cube”, twisted on its central axis, around the “grand staircase” which anchors the project and the site.

In this pivoting, the floor plans remain perfectly square and free from structures, perfectly functional for a museum or an exhibition that wraps around it, will benefit from varied views of the city.

The grand staircase, part of a four-flight “chamber”, will be experienced as a total immersive experience, a hollow volume, a plastic form that generates the building, which can be appropriated by an artist, like an inhabited work by Kogler. returns the image of the sky by its mirror base.

The pivoting of the volume generates the inflections of the facade: sometimes arched, sometimes curved! The overall aesthetic is reminiscent of the architectural aesthetic of the interior of the Hall!

Made of aluminum slats with champagne reflections, the shape is “carossée”. discreetly colored by iriodine pigments incorporated into the lacquer. They accentuate the reflections and the modeling given by the bending. It’s subtle, velvety and ultimately quite sensual …

images from architects

This building dress sometimes lifts, like a “hem” above the hall. The profile of these lifts refers to the “chain” profiles of the Hall.

Sometimes also, the metal slats pivot on themselves, this put in field, the facade then becomes a light filter, like a sunscreen. This draws forms in “bubbles”, floating in the space of the facade, a bit like clouds, or uncertain forms in a painting by Paul Klee.

At night, these floating forms are perceived as a modern stained-glass window and we then understand their kinship with the stained-glass rose windows of ancient cathedrals.

Address: Musée des Beaux-arts – Ville de Reims, 8 Rue Chanzy, 51100 Rheims, France

Contact Musée des Beaux-arts Reims: 03 26 47 28 44

Musée des Beaux-arts Reims images / information from X-TU, Architects

X-TU Architects

Location: 8 Rue Chanzy, 51100 Rheims, France

France Architecture

Contemporary Architecture in France

Museum Buildings

Musée des Beaux-arts Rheims, northeast France – 30 May 2012
Design: David Chipperfield Architects

image © David Chipperfield Architects
The new Musée des Beaux-arts is situated on the periphery of a long green space, arising from the town fortifications, between the old and new town. The Gallo- Roman gate and the modernist market hall, located in its vicinity, are evidence of Reim’s architectural history from antiquity to modern times. An excavation site with mediaeval findings is situated at the site of the new museum.