Art-Deco Details in Rheims

Rheims, with its wealth of Art-Deco buildings, offers an overwhelming number of interesting architectural details. Here's a small sampling. The first two are from houses. The next is from the interior of a bakery. This is a section of a frieze on the facade of the Carnegie Library. The last two details come from the Opera cinema: one of series of stained-glass lights below the awning, and part of the facade's main frieze.

Rheims and Art Deco

Eighty percent of Rheims was destroyed in the First World War, the worst loss of any of France's big cities. From this loss grew, at an incredible pace, a flowering of construction in 20th-Century styles, especially Art Deco. Reflecting the great destruction, 6,500 building permits were issued in Rheims between 1920 and 1930. The city held a competition among architects to plan its rebuilding. An American, G. B. Ford won. His plan led to opening up of public spaces, adding new public buildings, zoning for industry, and creating garden-city areas.

While Ford's plan specified some restrictions on building styles (e.g., no imitation Gothic buildings behind the cathedral), most of the city was open to architectural freedom and innovation. The 400 or so architects who designed Rheims's new buildings worked in a range of styles, from the Hausmann style of 19th-Century Paris to the "ocean-liner" style of large, moderne buildings. The style most often built, though, was Art Deco. The city's destruction and reconstruction turned Rheims into, effectively, the capital of Art Deco architecture. The Web site "Reims Ville Art Deco" provides comprehensive coverage.

Thanks to audioguides provided by the Rheims Tourist Office, Susie and I were able to take an Art-Deco walk through the city. Here are a few of the great Art-Deco buildings to which the tour took us.

This apartment building provided just about the purest representation of the Art Deco style of all the buildings we saw.

The ultra-modern addition to this Renaissance-style house was the project of the son of the house's owners.

The designer of this larger residential building managed to include references to Renaissance architecture, such as the oriel windows and the loggia, within a clearly Art-Deco style.







This smaller building, in the heart of the center of Rheims, includes a variety of Art-Deco features, such as abstract floral motifs, assymetry, a pergola, and simplified iron work.






Here's a view of a former bookstore, with its wonderful curves, lettering, and friezes.

On the eclectic side, this building is a garage for a residence on the street behind it.

For last, I've saved two of the most direct but opposite expressions of Art Deco. The first is the post office, which is modernist and built in concrete, but with lines and curves that make this building a sort of pure expression of Art-Deco principles.

The second is the facade of the Opera Cinema, a (former) movie palace. With its curves, friezes, ornements, gilding, and stained glass, this is about as far as you can get from the minimalist expression of the post office.

Culture Wars

Following up on my posts about architecture, I note that the changes in Metz's architecture, particularly in the early 20th Century, represented a sort of culture war, in which people with control of the "look" of the city expressed either German or French values. Metz, officially part of France since 1766, was part of Germany from 1870 to 1918. The border ran just south of Metz, so its neighbor and rival Nancy remained French.The Kaiser, particularly from about 1900 on, gave special attention to solidifying a German identity for Metz, while also increasing military readiness. For example, a key motivation for the new central train station in 1909 was that it would be capable of transporting 20,000 troops in 24 hours. Similarly, the Guide Michelin reports that the removal of the cathedral's neoclassical facade in 1903 was undertaken by Germans. I interpret this as meaning that, rather than being concerned with the facade's incongruity, they were trying to remove Frenchness.

After 1918, new buildings abandoned the Rhenish Romanesque. By the 1930s, buildings took on art deco and moderne styles, such as this building from 1933.

With its wild profusion of styles, Metz manages to integrate all of them in a way that all now look in place, especially in contrast to the huge metal-and-glass blocks of construction after World War II, plunked down like alien invaders, which drive the visitor away from their unwelcoming bulk toward the more human scale of the older streets and buildings. Metz's melange of Germanic and Latin traces reminds me of Trieste, which also changed identities as it passed back and forth between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy.

Metz has always been changing. For example, until the the end of the 19th Century the central city was still encircled by fortified walls and moats. But, like Toulouse and many other European cities, these were removed to make way for the grand boulevards that now define the cities' core. Metz retains few remnants of its old city walls. One now marooned part of the walls, the Tour Camoufle, was built in the 15th Century. The city's southern gate, the Porte Serpenoise, stands abandoned by the walls through which it once provided entry. This street was a Roman road. The present gate was built in 1852, originally more a tunnel through the fortifications, and reworked in 1903 to shorten the gate into its current form of a triumphal arch.

La Tour Camoufle, Metz

La Porte Serpenoise, Metz