Two thousand years ago, Lyon, then called Lugdun, was the largest city and administrative center of Roman Gaul. Here were born the emperors Claudius, who granted Roman citizenship to the local Gauls, and Caracalla, who extended it throughout the empire. Unlike many of the new cities of Rome, which had the correct layout of a military camp, Lugdun did not receive one due to the complex topography. The city was founded by the Romans at the confluence of two rivers - Sona and Rhone. Of the three parts, located on different banks, the most extensive occupied the mountainous Fourvière plateau (the warped Forum Vetus), which rises above the Old, medieval, city of Lyon. According to various sources, the population of Lugdun reached 80-100 thousand inhabitants, and there were quite a few public buildings in the city, including baths, a circus, an arena, and not even one, but two theaters.
Of all this architectural wealth, alas, not much has survived to this day, since in late antiquity the city center shifted to the banks of the Saone at the foot of Fourvière, and the locals gradually stole the ancient buildings for building materials. Roman theaters, having lost their walls, retained only the caveas cut into the slope and part of the substructures, which is why an inexperienced spectator may mistake them for Greek.
It was here, next to the theaters, that they decided to build a museum, which was opened in 1975. The architect Bernard Zerfus, who was tasked with the design, had the freedom to choose the location for the new building. Initially, it was planned to place it on a free area behind the theater screens. However, in this case, the museum would block the beautiful view of the city from the mountain. Moreover, it would be difficult to fit a large volume of a modern building into an antique ensemble. Therefore, Zerfus proposed a different, much more subtle solution - to bury the museum in the ground - more precisely in the side slope of the hill, bringing to the surface only one, upper level with a terrace. The main “drama” was played out in the interior, which makes an unexpectedly strong impression.
Zerfus (1911-1996) was one of the leading architects of France during the Glorious Thirty Years (1945-1975), but gradually faded into the background in the seventies. While in the civil service and heading the Office for the Design of Civil Buildings and National Palaces, he was one of those who determined the official architectural style of the Fifth Republic. His most famous works are the Center for Science and Technology (CNIT) in La Défense and the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Zerfus, along with his colleagues Robert Camelot and Jean de Mayy, can be considered the “fathers” of the La Defense district - they started in the 1950s and led this large project throughout the 1960s.
Despite the status of the objects (and, perhaps, that is why), and also because Zerfus created them in collaboration with other famous masters, his personal style is rather difficult to grasp. The style of his buildings, I would characterize as austere, technological modernism, which seemed most appropriate for expressing the success of De Gaulle's France. Both in the UNESCO building (1952-1978), and especially in the CNIT (1953-1958), the work of an engineer is very much felt, while the architect seems to have faded into the background. In the first case, Zerfus and his co-author Marcel Breuer worked with the great Pierre Luigi Nervi, in the second, Zerfus collaborated with Nicolas Eskiyan, who designed a three-support concrete shell with a 218-meter span, and Jean Prouve, who was responsible for the external glazing.
In the Lyon Museum, created by Zerfus without distinguished collaborators, this technological restraint gives way to a much more eloquent aesthetics of concrete brutalism. Most of the facade is a slope overgrown with bushes, and its "naturalness" is disturbed only by a few square windows with rounded corners characteristic of that time. The interior space of the museum is designed in the form of an extended ramp that winds several times, on the wide terraces of which exhibits are displayed. You enter at the top, and then gradually go down to exit at the level of theatrical skens. This configuration is more typical for a multi-level parking, but the interior gives rise to different allusions. From the inside, the museum resembles antique cisterns and, quite unexpectedly, a fantastic spaceship that came to Earth in time immemorial, abandoned by the crew and inhabited by the aborigines. Both images seem to be extremely appropriate, which cannot be said about the linear structure of the building, which sets a rigid route for the movement of visitors. They don't do that anymore. But Wright's Guggenheim has the same problems.
Another weak point of the project is the lack of natural light, but this deficiency is compensated for by the brutal expressiveness of the Cyclopean concrete structures. The columns are not vertical, their axes follow the slope, and, combined with the curves of the ramps, this non-orthogonality gives dynamism to the interior space.
Of course, by today's standards the exposition looks archaic, but this is not a question of architecture, but of the design of the exhibition.
