On Nov. 12, students in the ART 188 took the class’s second field trip to Briey and Metz, France. The trip was dedicated to seeing modern art and architecture.
In Briey, students visited the Unite d’habitation, a housing unit built by the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, also known as Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier’s intention was to form a cohesive community by designing structures where people could live, work, play and shop all in the same building. The unit in Briey is one of five that he built in France and Germany.
The apartments in Le Corbusier’s design each have a kitchen and living room with either an upper level or lower level where the bedrooms and bathroom are. Students were able to see an apartment decorated with furniture from the sixties to show Le Corbusier’s original vision, plus an apartment that is more modernized.
After lunch and an hour bus ride to Metz, students visited the Centre Pompidou-Metz, a museum with different exhibits on modern art. The building itself is famous for its roof structure, composed of convex and concave curves meant to resemble a woven Chinese hat. It was built with a mesh structure of two layers of glue laminated timber with a waterproof protective covering on top made of fabric, fiberglass and teflon.
Students saw two of the exhibits during their museum visit. The first, titled “Arcimboldo Face to Face,” is named after Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a 16th-century artist. Arcimboldo's work, which deviates from the traditional portrait painting before his time, has influenced art history for centuries. The exhibit is a selection of 250 works by 130 artists inspired by Arcimboldo’s techniques.
“Writing is Drawing” was the name of the second exhibit. The idea for this exhibition came from Etel Adnan, a poet and artist from Lebanon. Her interest in writing and different languages encouraged the basis of her artwork, “leporellos,” which are folding leaflets. Adnan pays tribute to poets all over the world in by painting and writing in the leporellos. The exhibit also featured works by other contemporary artists and writers who combine writing and imagery.
The field trip ended with a discussion on the bus ride back to Differdange about the different artwork and architecture the students saw.
