Paris 8/28/2008

The robot eater was out again this morning.

The first thing we did after getting up was we walked to the Cartier Foundation. It is a contemporary art museum that was designed by Jean Nouvel, that we learned about in school. It was built on what used to be a small wooded lot, so instead of destroying all the trees to make room for the building, he set the building back from the street and put a glass wall on the street creating a wooded space for art between the building and the street. We didn’t go in (this is the last time, Phillip), but looked around the outside. We then decided to go to the Rodin Museum, which my sister had recommended. We took the metro and on the way there we came across the Musee de l’Armee. We didn’t know what it was, but saw that it was a really old building so we walked through it. It had a big courtyard with a statue of some dude with his hand in his jacket. It turned out that that same dude was buried in the adjacent building.

We continued on across the street to the Rodin Museum. I had seen castings of some of his most famous sculptures when the exhibit came to the North Carolina Museum of Art several years ago. The museum consisted of an outdoor sculpture garden with large scale bronze castings and originals inside his home. According to Encylcopedia Mary the French government realized Rodin’s value while he was alive and gave him this wonderful home to live in, in agreement that he would leave them his work when he died. Some of my favorites were the smaller simpler sculptures like the hands in this photograph.

After Rodin Museum we went to the Pompidou Center, another building we had studied. This was one of my favorite things in Paris. It is a modern art museum that has a very unique look to it. The concept is that the building is basically inside out. All the things that are normally hidden within the wall are celebrated and expressed on outside of the building. So the façade is covered in brightly colored piping and structural trusses. To go to the exhibits one has to travel up an escalator that is in a giant tube attached to the outside of the building, and overlooks a large courtyard. The exhibits were fun to look at, especially one on a French architecture firm and several models they had created.