Location: Rodez, Aveyron , France
Architect: RCR Arquitectes
Completed: 2014
11 Photographs
Sometimes a building arrives as surprise, a random part of another adventure entirely. We had driven from the top of France to the bottom to visit some friends a few days previously and had quickly adjusted to the uptick in cheese and bread consumption. I would not say I have travelled extensively in France, but a healthy majority of that has been exploring cities or wandering the countryside looking for buildings, and already this trip we’d seen some delights old and new.
I had first heard of RCR Architectes some years beforehand, when an architect friend with whom I was collaborating was ruminating on the blackened steel panels lining the inside. At the time, we only looked at some photographs of that part of the building at the time and so I knew very little about it. That day we journeyed to Rodez specifically, to visit the gallery and restaurant for that same friend’s birthday, and after a spectacularly good and uniquely French meal, we walked through the museum grounds and the gallery itself.
As is obvious from the pictures, this was the perfect kind of day to wander around this building. The scattered clouds providing a pale muted backdrop against the faded green summer grass and the earthen red of the weathering steel. It is a beautifully simple building, in both form and function, perched on the edge of a green strip, overlooking the city.
The gallery itself contains only the work of the artist for which it is named, Pierre Soulages, whose work seems to my untrained eye to be at the intersection between painting and sculpture. Perhaps it is what you might call physical painting, exploring texture and material and graphic in what to me seems like an exciting and abstract way.
I cannot remember another museum that enclosed the work of a specific artist with quite the same effortless poise as the Musée Soulages does. The beautiful weathering steel box outside, with the blackened steel inside, and the unique work of Soulages lurking in the shadows behind the veil. It really is a marvel. I have heard before of great museums that the curators did not rush to fill because of the drama of the spaces themselves. While this does not feel like that in quite the same way, it definitely feels like neither needs the other, despite belonging together.
HWLK