Vanishing Architecture
Annabelle Hagmann,Photos Stéphane Chalmeau / Frédéric Delangle
Vanishing ArchitecturePrehistory, antiquity, the Middle Ages… from Modern Times to the Third Millennium, the Vendée Historical Museum building erects a new bridge between regional culture and contemporary architecture… A meadow floating on the horizon, a huge creature dozing in the Vendée pasturelands, breathing in time to its seasons, sometimes with very short hair, sometimes with hair that’s tousled, verdant and iridescent.That faceted machine is truly disquieting — built like a stealth bomber, chiseled with sloping planes and supported by five hundred tons of steel.A clean, sharp, gash cuts right through it, opening onto a wide staircase. You descend it to feel a presence then turn around — Oh, façade! Dazzling with light, gaping, open onto the river in the background. Keep going, enter the great, vast landscape, experience the hollow paths, emerge upon a monument within a monument — an object frozen in the background of the painting.But what’s being whispered under that green coat? What’s the meaning of that rooting, of those lines? What’s the hollow path for, or this landscape within a landscape, if not to strangely evoke a vanishing?Edifying HistoryIn its active version, the one that’s staged and endlessly replayed like a bucolic drama.It’s a museum of its own history — that of the Vendée — and a building-symbol, green and bronze, heavy and floating, eluding the codes of monumentalism to generate the delicate music of an odd site, the theater of a sinister battle in the Vendée. Ancient history that slumbers peacefully with a gash along its right side.
