Back in the US

Susie and I are back in the US of A, in the Continental Airlines President's Club in Houston, actually. The eleven-hour flight was actually pleasant, and I was able to get some work done on the plane.

I was expecting some degree of culture shock, but so far nothing to report. Maybe it's because, across the world, airports are such artificial environments that there's not much left to shock, culturally speaking.

As I wrote the other day, I'll continue to blog about our travels until I'm caught up. This will probably take a couple of weeks.

Contrasts

Rheims

The Carnegie Library of Rheims

In the wake of the First World War, American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie contributed funds for the construction of libraries in the three most-damaged cities of Europe. One of these libraries was given to Rheims. Building started in 1921 and was completed in 1927. From its inauguration in 1928 until all the way to 2003, it served as Rheim's main library.

The Carnegie Library of Rheims was, from its inception, a symbol of Franco-American relations. The President of the Republic and the U.S. Ambassador to France attended the library's inauguration. The building was designed by the Rheims architect Max Sainsaulieu in the Art Deco style that led the city's post-war reconstruction. From its exterior friezes to its interior elements, the building is Art Deco.

Sainsaulieu conceived of the building as a temple to knowledge. The main reading room is a high-ceilinged space with large windows and two stories of bookshelves. Although the room is not particularly large, it is luminous and warm.

The reading room's leaded windows are works of art...

...as is the stained-glass ceiling by Jacques Gruber.


The card-catalog room also boasts two levels.



The lobby is paneled in onyx, with inset mosaics. These mosaics, designed by Henri Sauvage, depict a variety of human intellectual and physical activities. Here is a sampling of these mosaics.

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.

Rheims

Susie and I spent two days in Rheims, which wasn't at all like I had expected. Rheims is famous above all for its cathedral, which was where the kings of France were crowned over a span of a thousand years. But the city is not another quaint assemblage of narrow medieval streets with half-timbered buildings. On the contrary, Rheims is a gracious city of broad esplanades lined with buildings from the 1920s and 30s.

This turns out to be for terrible reasons, but the result is a city that feels like a smaller, lower, and calmer version of Paris. Almost all of central Rheims was destroyed by German shelling in the First World War. The city had been evacuated, so few civilians lost their lives. But the destruction of Rheims's buildings was so complete that the city had to re-envision itself, replan itself, and rebuild itself. Over the course of the 1920s and early 1930s, often with reparation funds, the inhabitants rebuilt their city in a modern idiom, and primarily in the Art Deco style. Here's an example. I'll write blog post that takes readers on an abbreviated tour of some of Rheims's Art Deco buildings.

The cathedral was badly damaged in World War I, as well. It's been rebuilt and restored--indeed, restoration work continues to this day. I'll write another blog post with details on the cathedral and its history.

One of the few buildings to survive World War I largely unscathed (its facade, anyway) was the Grand Theatre, a neo-Classical structure from the Belle Epoque. The auditorium and stage had to be rebuilt after the war. The auditorium is rather intimate compared to some opera houses. It has a glass ceiling surrounded by elegant paintings that must be from the 1920s. Susie and I were able to attend a terrific performance of Rossini's "La Cenerentola." Rossini based his opera on the story of Cinderella, and this staging--a co-production with Spoleto USA and Avignon--certainly lived up to the promise of the magic in Cinderella's tale. The singing was superb, the sets (including computer effects!) excellent, the staging imaginative and funny, and the orchestra sparkling.

One of the best buildings in Rheims is a Carnegie Library, an Art Deco masterpiece from the 1920s. I hope to be able to blog about this building in detail.

Many of the streets in central Rheims are reserved for pedestrians. With a carousel, fountains, monuments, and those Art Deco buildings, these streets bring a charm and liveliness to the city.

And if your feet get tired from walking to see all those buildings, or if you're meeting friends for drinks or dinner, the broad pedestrian avenues of Rheims offer many restaurants, cafes, and bars from which you can choose.

Nearly on Our Way Home

Our plane leaves from Paris on Saturday morning, so we're starting our way home on Friday. It's been a great few months, full of professional growth thanks to Georgia Tech-Lorraine, of satisfaction of teaching thanks to the students here, of discovering and learning about Metz and Lorraine, and of exploring much of northern France.

Susie and I have spent the last two days here in Metz, repacking and saying goodbyes. As you can tell from the blog postings over the last few days, we had worked our way east from Brittany. We spent two nights in Rouen and two nights in Rheims. I was able to post the blog entries for Rouen, and I hope to get some of the blog entries on Rheims posted before we leave. However, that will still leave a lot left unblogged, and I'm planning to post these items after we get back to El Paso. The remaining material includes villages in the Champagne region, our trip to Malta for the LREC 2010 conference, our visit here in Metz to the Robert Schumann museum (the father of the European Union, not the composer), more details of Paris, much more on Rheims, and some reflections on contrasts of daily life in Metz and El Paso.

So please check back over the course of the next few weeks for these postings.

Contrasts

Rouen