A museum of time

This article was originally published in Domus 965 / January 2013

It's the kind of morning so damp and grey that it feels like the day will never really break. The landscape here is flat and wide but horizonless; the mist blurs earth into sky. The ground itself has been scraped into raw brown furrows streaked with the green pointillist haze of winter crops. These giant brown-green planes are dotted with white seagulls and scored with the sharp calligraphic strokes of pylons and skeletal trees.

Its flatness is clear of any natural interruption as though it's been worked over by farming and industry, pummelled into total abstraction by the history of Northern France. The landscape is divided into the two-dimensional geometries of highways, logistics and ownership, inscribed with the reach and scope of machines. Out of this hazy flatness two gigantic black cones rise up. These are Europe's biggest slag heaps, remnants of the mining industry that once characterised the region. Their profoundly abstract shape and scale is of the kind that only unconscious industry can produce. The strange angular geometries of post-industry are now home to the Louvre-Lens. Built on the site of a mine that closed back in the 1980s, the new museum is a regional outpost of the grand Parisian Louvre. The project is perhaps the last of Europe's regional-scaled post-industrial cultural projects that began with the Guggenheim Bilbao. Here at the other end of that two-decade project, the Louvre quickly churns through the familiar arguments: tourism, culture as post-industrial salve, regeneration and regionalism. But there's something else at stake here: a reinvented iteration of the Louvre itself.

The building shares the low blocky massing and the glazed-metallic cladding of the industrial-agricultural vernacular that surrounds it. But SANAA's hyper-precision recasts this prosaic substance in otherworldly form, as though the geometric flatness of the landscape has risen into bodily form. From the perimeter of the site, the building's brushed-aluminium cladding appears as long, low rectangles of a smeary Gerhard Richter. The surface effect of the panels sucks all the gravity out of its substance, its mass evaporating. It is a building seemingly formed of arrangements of Pas-de-Calais mist.

So abstracted are its reflections that its walls often appear spectral, even that we might be looking through them. As the building turns corners, its volumes reflect each other so that ghostly volumes flicker across its surface. The museum disappears into itself, appearing to be caught in the act of vanishing into a state where substance and shape are half atomised.

And this inversion is a clue to the building's character. The Louvre-Lens can't be read without reference to its behemoth of a mother, the Palais du Louvre in Paris. The Louvre is an entity, building and institution of gigantic cultural significance, linked closely to the construction of national identity and to the machinations of imperialism and colonialism. In programme and symbolism, the Louvre-Lens attempts to re-imagine the Louvre, to create a different order of museum, one that inverts the characteristics of the historical culture palace. We can read in its lightness, for example, an opposition to the sheer weight of stone. Its blankness contrasts with the overwrought surfaces of the Louvre, bristling with decorative code and figural narrative. We read opposition in its plan too, where two wings asymmetrically flank a central pavilion as an inverted recollection of the hypersymmetry of the old Louvre Palace.

Like the child of a famous and significant parent, it feels a compulsion to counter the very things that spawned it. The Galerie du Temps is the clearest curatorial inversion that the Louvre-Lens performs. It is the heart of the project, the centre of its curatorial ambition. Its huge open space opens up to us. The slender white fin-beams of its portal frame obscure the light filtering from above. The gallery walls have the same reflective sheen as the exterior, and have a strange, almost imperceptible warp to their plan. There is something unusual in the effect that the room produces, as though its atmosphere has something of the fog outside. Space and light seem to become more physical, as though alchemised into a hazy substance.

A pale concrete floor slopes away from us like a landscape. But this is a landscape conceived as time rather than space. As the room stretches out before us, so too does time. It begins at 3500 BCE and continues to the mid-19th century, the point where the Louvre's collection ends. Like a scale rule, calibrations of time are etched into the gallery wall. The objects are arranged in archipelagos against this chronological progression so that time faces us as we enter the room. The statues all turn their faces towards us, startled like the regulars in a saloon bar. Every step we take is a stride of 100 years.

The curatorial statement tells us that this is in direct opposition to the organisation of the Louvre in Paris, where objects are grouped by department. Here, the intention is for the whole of human culture to play out in a continuum, for unexpected relationships to be forged across the boundaries of museological time and space. The ambition of the Galerie du Temps is huge: a single space containing all of human culture. There is something final about it too, like the closing scene of Kubrick's 2001 where Louis XIV furniture is bathed in a space-age white glow.

But there's something peculiar at the heart of the brief. Removing categories of technique, geography and culture and prioritising a linear chronology conceptually and architecturally leaves us with just as rigid a form of curatorial narrative as any 19th-century museum. If a subjective and unexpected relation is at stake, we find ourselves instead unable to escape a linear idea of time itself.

In alternative examples such as the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing, art history and oblique reference coexist. The Louvre-Lens gives us a single point perspective of history, and as such it seems entirely Cartesian, a space rooted in the French Enlightenment. It also seems to play to a certain weakness in SANAA's contribution to the project. If the studio's work could be characterised by one thing, it would be the ability to make matrix field plans of tremendous abstraction, a kind of hyperrelational field. Yet here, these gestures are left behind in other parts of the museum, in the bubble-plan pavilions of bookshops, cafes and restaurants, for example. In this great hall, we ironically seem to return to a hyper-formality, a space striated with meaning rather than ambiguity (where even every step means moving forward or backward in time).

The Galerie du Temps is a sensational exhibition space, and the idea of space measured like the tick of a clock is an admirably high concept, for however flawed. It also reminds us that the architecture is not only formally related to the region's agricultural-industrial buildings. These are building-sized environments where temperature and light are manipulated to produce artificial climates out of time and space. They allow crops to grow out of season and synthetically accelerate natural growth. We could imagine the Galerie du Temps as a kind of cultural forcing house, a highly refined environment that supports history and culture rather than horticulture.

Its contents are a superb greatest-hits package, a concentrated experience of high-grade cultural objects. Etruscan, Greek, Roman, Islamic and Renaissance sculptures and paintings seem suspended in the Galerie's atmosphere. These high-water marks of human culture seem to lose their earthly footing and float like the debris of an asteroid belt in a Walmart-sublime architectural apparatus.

The Louvre-Lens is really a museum about a museum, a museum of the Louvre itself. We can see it in its post-curatorial vision of art history and in the transparency of the building that seems to let us see the museum's very structure. It's there too in the basement, where archive and storage rooms are opened up to public view, where busts and canvasses are arranged on industrial racks. The museum might present objects from the Louvre collection, but it also displays the mechanics of the Louvre itself. The history of the museum becomes an archaeology of its own, an archaeology that lets us glimpse the museum's role in manufacturing historical narratives. It displays a record of the power, imperialism and colonialism within which it was forged. And it lays out the museum's pivotal role in the construction of national identity and Western culture. Sam Jacob, architect and critic, director of the architecture firm FAT