Beaux-Arts revival.

Ths Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille reopened in June following an extensive programme of modernisation and extension that combines restoration of the nineteenth-century museum with a bold new gallery for the drawings

The Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille is reputed to have the finest public art collection in France after the Louvre - holdings include many valuable works expropriated from local churches and religious communities during the French Revolution, among them large altarpieces by artists of the calibre of Rubens and Van Dyck. Yet in the 1980s, neither the museum nor its collections rated very high as a centre for cultural tourism - 'The atmosphere of the place is dark and musty. the display of the works is poor and old-fashioned, and the condition of the paintings generally lamentable,' complained The Traveller's Guide to Art in 1984.(1)

Lille's new strategic position at the junction . of high-speed railway lines between London, Brussels and Paris (AR September 1993) provided a pressing incentive to improve this sorry state of affairs. Permanent and reserve collections at the Palais des Beaux-Arts were reappraised and agreement was reached that 16 plans-en-relief (large topographical models of strategically important towns, dating from the mid-seventeenth to the late-nineteenth centuries) from the national collection in Paris should be permanently located there. In 1990, four teams of architects were invited to present proposals in a limited competition, showing how the museum's existing premises might be adapted and extended to meet future needs.(2)

Ibos and Vitart proposed the grandeur and spatial logic of the original museum building be reinstated, and that it be completed in contemporary terms, to 'open the museum to the city'. To this end, they suggested a substantial proportion of the accommodation required by the brief, including that for the plans-en-relief, should be provided below ground level, in new and existing basements.

Purpose-built between 1889 and 1892, to designs of Parisian architects E. J. C. Berard and F. E. C. Delmas, the museum has an imposing symmetrical entrance front facing the Prefecture across Place de la Republique. But works were stopped when only the front half of the project had been built, comprising three main ranges disposed round an internal courtyard, closed by a cross-range to the south. As a result. the back side of the museum was left unfinished and the rest of the island site unbuilt. The courtyard was later glazed over and a grand staircase inserted within it; in time, principal rooms and galleries in the main ranges were subdivided both vertically and horizontally, extra administrative offices tacked on at the back, and many other ad hoc modifications made.

The original building has now been purged of most of the later additions and thoroughly cleaned. Ibos and Vitart have sought to make its internal volumes legible by organising exhibition spaces with distinctly different characteristics round what they describe as two strategic voids - the main entrance hall and the contiguous double-storey volume now known as the Atrium (originally Berard and Delmas's central courtyard).

The mighty front retains its function as the museum's public entrance and, although only one of the two entrance doors is currently in use, Ibos and Vitart have respected the symmetry of the ground floor layout. To counterbalance the pomp of the main entrance hall, lobbies at each end are lit by enormous pendulous confections in multi-coloured glass specially designed by Gaetano Pesce and entitled 'Two Bags for Lille'. Stair towers adjoining each lobby lead to first-floor picture galleries and grilles directly ahead afford views clean through the symmetrically placed ground-storey galleries (serried ranks of purpose-designed glass-topped display cases containing ceramics in one, nineteenth-century French sculpture mounted on stone plinths in the other). The space is otherwise virtually empty, apart from curved steel bench seating in window bays, together with rectangular ticket and information desks, also in steel, which are set between column bases and mask a new stairwell plunging down to bright red basement cloakrooms. Spiteful-looking steel guard rails demarcate the route to the Atrium, from where all other museum spaces are reached.

Beneath the retained 1930s glazed ceiling, the Atrium has been disencumbered of the grand staircase and other additions, to provide clear south facing views to the eye-catching elevation of Ibos and Vitart's new building. Tea-room and bookshop are tucked away among ground-storey colonnades, while the central space is largely given over to an installation specially commissioned from Giulio Paolini, composed of a mirror-glass sphere suspended above 48 transparent glass cubes. The installation, and the movement of visitors among the cubes, can be observed from vantage points in the first-floor colonnade.

At first-floor level, picture galleries retain their original location and sky-lighting and, beneath a mezzanine storey where the reserve collections are now located, a small daylight-free gallery has been provided for exhibitions of drawings. Ibos and Vitart wanted all picture gallery walls to be painted bright red, but were overruled. A darker red has been used for taller galleries but, as red was deemed too overwhelming for less lofty galleries, the latter have been re-painted pale pink-a compromise that has pleased nobody. Gallery seating was chosen by the architects (Jasper Morrison stools and benches, and a few comfortable if smelly felt chairs with colourful quilted linings, designed by Gaetano Pesce), while sundry other items - such as the hideous moulded plastic domes protecting magnificent mappa mundi - were not.

Brick-vaulted basements beneath the two side ranges have been converted into dignified galleries for mediaeval and Renaissance art, but other basement exhibition spaces are less satisfactory - mostly because the lighting, the display techniques, or both, make it difficult to see the exhibits. Most disappointing of all is the display of the plans-en-relief.(3) Their interest is by no means confined to military historians, for the towns and their surrounding terrain are represented in fastidious detail. As it is, the models are deprived of much of their interest because the most detailed parts have to be discerned at a distance, beyond areas depicting acres of terrain. How much more fortunate were those able to see several of the plans-en-relief before the museum opened, spread out on the floor to be photographed in the new gallery Ibos and Vitart have designed for temporary exhibitions.

Although located at a lower basement level (between the new lecture theatre, library and workshops), this gallery is naturally lit from above. A large rectangular area of clear glazing provides the gallery with top-lighting, edged with narrow water channels to symbolise a lake at ground level, where it forms the centrepiece of a 'room open to the sky'. This is further delineated along the east-west axis by a series of rectilinear mesh cages that protect the escape stairs from the basement. The new open space so created is bounded to the north by the back side of the museum, now stripped of accumulated accretions.

Placed opposite, where Berard and Delmas's unbuilt southern range might have been, is a strictly orthogonal slim new six-storey building, containing a restaurant at ground level and, on upper floors, south-facing accommodation for the museum administration and the cabinet des dessins (the drawings collection), which are reached by narrow north-facing access corridors. Golden rectangles on a bright red ground (representing the display of pictures) on corridor walls are seen from the outside through a veil of outward-facing mirror strips applied to a clear-glazed elevational skin. The interplay of reflections and transparencies so produced is enriched by the lattice pattern of security doors to the cabinet des dessins on the second floor, by mutations in the weather, by canted corridor corners and so on. And, every time visitors wander along any of the corridors to the lifts or the loos, an extra dimension is added by the new sequences of superimpositions that occur as they move between the two wall planes, momentarily separating reflections of the museum from the red and gold background as they pass. Needless to say, this much-photographed elevation is designed to mark the interface between old and new and, even though Berard and Delmas would probably have been mortified had they known so much attention would be focused on the unfinished rear of their own building, the device provides a very striking symbol of the museum's revival.

Ibos and Vitart have employed a similar configuration of double-glazed panels for the other three sides of the building where, in the main, transparencies are limited to blurred outlines, and reflections to a gentle iridescent glow. All double glazing is semi-obscured except for a few clear-glazed top-hung opening windows. Automated external blinds designed to protect the outside face of all south-facing glass from sunlight will soon be installed. At this end of the site, the ground plane has been overlaid with red tarmac paths, set out in a grid pattern intended to evoke a jardin a la francaise (to be completed after an existing red brick boiler house and its spectacular rusting free-standing chimney are demolished). The same motif is continued as a border along both sides of the site, just inside conventional boundary railings which terminate behind the stair towers flanking the museum's main entrance frontage.

The seven-year process of modernising and extending the Palais des Beaux-Arts has been described as a head-on clash between the prejudices of the French museum establishment and the arrogance of the Parisian architectural avant-garde of the 1980s.(4) If the outcome has not always been to the benefit of the visiting public, few of the most flagrant flaws are irretrievable and most could be reversed or modified with relative ease. A regrettable exception is the dozens of tiny light fittings set out in polka-dot formation in the main entrance hall and surrounding galleries, intended to enliven classical masonry details. For this purpose, the stone vaulting has been peppered with holes, and, as the stone will almost certainly outlast the light fittings, its permanent mutilation for so transitory a purpose does not fall far short of wilful damage.

Nevertheless, although such was almost certainly not their intention, Ibos and Vitart have given future curators plenty of scope to make changes, to move things around and keep abreast with the times. Moreover, the museum has gained 5000 sqm extra space for permanent collections (giving an overall 7800 sqm) as well as a 700 sqm gallery for temporary exhibitions and all manner of ancillary facilities. The late nineteenth-century building has regained much of its dignity and, last but not least, Lille has acquired an emblematic new building that makes a creditable contribution to late twentieth-century French architecture. As of now, the Palais des Beaux-Arts deserves a new guidebook rating - vaut le voyage.

1 Michael Jacobs and Paul Stirton, The Mitchell Beazley Traveller's Guide to Art: France, Mitchell Beazley, London, 1984, Some 400 paintings from the permanent and reserve collections have been restored and cleaned since 1990, as have numerous sculptures and objets d'art.

2 Ibos & Vitart; Chemetov & Huidobro; Lion & Levitt; Duhart, Munch & Chauval, The entries were illustrated in L'architecture d'aujourd'hui No 271, October 1990.

3 The decentralisation of the national plans-en-relief collection from the Invalides in Paris, and the transfer of a substantial part of it to a museum to be created for the purpose in Lille, was envisaged in the mid-1980s. The project was scrapped by the incoming Gaullist government in 1987 but, by then, a number of plans en-relief had already arrived in Lille. None was returned to the Invalides until formal agreement was reached that the model of Lille and some of those showing other former French military strongholds in Flanders, such as Maastricht, should remain in Lille It was later agreed these 16 models should be conserved at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. The decision that the national plans-en-relief collection should be so split remains controversial.

4 Cf. Le Monde, 8-9 June 1997.