19th century gallery
In 1889, France celebrated the centenary of the French Revolution. The country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) strengthened the authorities' desire to take revenge on Germany in the technological and scientific spheres, and at the World Exhibition of 1889 Paris showed the latest national achievements in the field of building materials and technologies.
In the same year, a few months after the construction of the Eiffel Tower, the Zoology Gallery, designed by the architect Jules André, was opened in the Parisian Garden of Plants. Like its more famous contemporary, the Gallery was ahead of its time in many ways. Technological advances allowed the architect to maximize the dimensions of the 3-tiered atrium, supported by cast iron columns and covered with a glass vault of over 1,000 square meters. Demonstration of the building's metal structure at that time was not the norm and was not approved, so from the outside it is “dressed” in a stone façade in the spirit of the “official” architecture of the late 19th century.
The Gallery housed the collections of the Natural History Museum, established in 1793 and in turn continuing the tradition of the Royal Collections. The heir to the ideas of the Enlightenment, the exhibition was an ordered catalog, a kind of library of exhibits, where a person acted as the owner.
Post-war years
After the end of the Second World War, there were not enough funds to maintain the museum. In 1965, the Zoology Gallery closed and began to gradually deteriorate. After darkening the central vault with metal sheets, the building plunged into darkness. This was the beginning of a long sleep that lasted over 20 years.
In the mid-1980s, interest in the building rekindled, and in 1987 the Ministry of Education announced an international competition for a renovation plan for the Gallery, adding to the list of François Mitterrand's Big Projects. The project of the updated Gallery, now not zoology, but evolution, was supposed to present a new "scenario" to replace the outdated exposition, and also include an underground level for temporary exhibitions, a new entrance group along the longitudinal axis of the building and make all its levels easily accessible using lifts and additional stairs.
In an interview in 1994, Paul Shemetov, co-author of the laureate project, spoke about the first impressions caused by visiting the abandoned Gallery: “I was struck by the filter effect, the haze that covered everything, even some layer of memory and history that we wanted to preserve in the new project.
Gallery Evolution
The transformation project, proposed by Paul Shemetov together with Borja Uidobro, engineer Mark Mimram and set designer Rene Allo, replaced the exhibition-catalog with a more lively, interactive exhibition, where the theory of evolution would be comprehended using a pre-prepared viewing route. The story about evolution is divided into three parts: the variety of living beings (1st and 2nd levels), the evolution of life (4th level-balcony), man as a factor of evolution (3rd level-balcony). The architectural design follows directly from this scenario.
The central "arena" of the exposition was a platform at the height of the second level, paved with light-colored wooden parquet, along which a line of animals freed from their previous pedestals and protective glasses is moving. The first level houses the inhabitants of the underwater world. The opening of the foundations made it possible to include in the interior arches and pylons made of millstone, the archaic brutality of which echoes the skeletons of whales suspended above the descent into the underground level. Tiers of balconies are pierced by panoramic elevators and metal staircases.
The idea of evolution is reflected in the choice of materials. Time-stamped dark wood paneling with carved ornaments, red-brown painted cast iron structures, wrought iron railings complemented by laconic modern components of gray steel, glass, smooth birch and beech wood panels. The old oak parquet, preserved in the balconies' galleries, was restored and returned to its original place.
Project concept
At the opening ceremony of the Gallery in 1994, Paul Shemetov formulated the main ideas of his work: “The building transformation project touched upon an important topic: a dialogue between the old and the new. We wanted our work to be a kind of handover of the baton from the 19th to the 20th centuries and to raise the question: was the 19th century, striving for progress, more radical than the modernization of the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Despite the fact that the concept of modernity is now on everyone's lips, the ability to see the old through the new and separate it from the new being created, with the apparent poverty of the old, seems undeveloped. To achieve it, you need to take the risk of creating something new and not think that you can get off so easily just by resorting to the whims of fashion or to some kind of "antique" quotes.
Today, if the restoration of a building or its preservation belongs to the body of technical and historical knowledge, then transformation makes other skills necessary. You need to be able to invent, "instill", oppose, evaluate critically. It would be dishonest from an aesthetic and historical point of view to create a new entrance "à la Jules André", because it was neither drawn nor foreseen by [the author of the original project]. The introduction of new elements into the old order in this case is a tribute to the integrity of the building.
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In architecture, the concept of a copy of style, imitation, fake old, that is, superficiality, is often referred to as conservation. But the authenticity of the work is lost in the name of an impossible return to the original values; natural death is replaced by death through long conservation, which denies time and thereby freezes memory.
After each restoration, the monument becomes, in any case, new again. It is impossible every time to return it to its original form or even to the previous conditions of existence. Aging is inevitable. It cannot be slowed down just by contrasting the existing ruin with another ruin that will respond to the needs of the project. Transformation, on the other hand, creates an object that did not exist before, which, however, is not a fake. Our approach to this issue, and ultimately our relationship to history, separates us from conservatives. They think that today's sign, today's project, today's city, today's needs should be subdued with the help of mimesis, conquered by the past, meaning that the new should adapt to the old. Common sense takes the opposite point of view: the old must adapt to the new.
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The past, which is needed for comparison with the new situation, must be staged, brought closer to real conditions in order to play its role in this confrontation. Otherwise, one would think that only the primacy of the past gives it the status of evidence. Memory reconstruction work, like in this building, is needed. This was the most difficult goal of our museographic project."
Dialogue with the past
This approach to the historic building was truly innovative for its time. The past in this case does not become a relic, but plays according to the same rules as the present. The old parts of the building have been left intact, but are used in a different configuration. In this, the design of the exhibition is similar in concept to the architectural solution: to separate the exhibits from the pedestals or to illuminate them in a different way already meant transforming perception.
The concept of the project in this sense makes a step forward in comparison with the postulates of the Venice Charter, drawn up 30 years earlier [The Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites was signed in 1964 and served as the basis for the creation of ICOMOS (International Council for the Conservation of Monuments and Sites). places) - note by T. K.]. The charter implies a kind of incrustation of the new into the old, while preserving all the spatial characteristics of the old and recognizing its unconditional priority. And, although the project of transformation of the Gallery of Evolution, speaking in modern language, also denies imitation of the past, it creates a new type of integration into historical material, achieving an almost organic symbiosis between the new and the old.
Thanks to this approach, the building of the Gallery of Evolution remains modern today, after 20 years have passed since the implementation of Shemetov's project.
