France can teach us a lot about building things
Investments in transportation, culture are striking, Andrew Cohen says.
The Millau Viaduct soars above the creases of the countryside of Languedoc, etched against the gun-metal sky, a singular feat of modern engineering.
Tapered concrete pylons support a latticework of cables. The bridge soars 343 metres high. This road to heaven is paved with style. Designed by Norman Foster, the celebrated British architect, it opened in 2004.
A new visitor’s centre mixes film (an “expérience immersif!”) and virtual reality, but mercifully little of the braggadocio of a big public works project in the United States.
It’s the tallest bridge in the world and perhaps the prettiest. These are the least of the superlatives, though, in a country that understands how to move around its 64 million people, most in farflung small cities, towns and villages.
The purpose of the bridge was to relieve a bottleneck in north-south traffic. Construction took just three years and cost 400 million euros; for an enterprise this dazzling, it didn’t take that long or cost that much. (Consider, by contrast, the time and cost of reconstructing the Champlain Bridge.)
And the Millau Viaduct is not that unusual here. Transportation — as well as architecture, design and culture — is an emblem of a society. It matters.
Lyon, a city of 506,000, has had a subway system for decades. Yet it looks like it opened yesterday, carrying commuters around town on four lines and connecting seamlessly with a network of sparkling trams.
Lyon is the third-largest city in France. Smaller cities, such as Avignon, encourage leaving cars outside the city in free parking lots served by low-carbon free shuttle buses. Everywhere there are dedicated bicycle lanes. Between the country’s cities, there are high-speed TGV trains. France is not alone — Spain, Germany and Italy also have superb high-speed service — but no one does it better.
Reserve a long-term parking spot at the TGV station in Avignon, enter a surreal, bright station, and wait on a terraced platform. Take a seat in a well-appointed carriage. Voilà, Paris in under three hours.
Maybe this instinct for technology and beauty came from the Romans; southern France is dotted with the ruins of their roads, aqueducts and amphitheatres. Good as it is, the Millau Viaduct is built to last only 75 years.
Another striking investment is in roads. Tolls on the thoroughfares sting, but the system is automated and the roads are smooth and airless. If you aren’t in a hurry, secondary roads are scenic.
The investment continues in museums and theatres. Lyon boasts a new opera house, the venerable Musée des Beaux-Arts and several lesser museums. The newest is the futuristic Musée des Confluences, where the Rhone and Saône rivers meet. It shimmers in winter’s thin light. The collection — “the story of mankind,” it ambitiously declares — is dense, but it remains an esthetic statement. Strangely, that’s almost enough.
Then there are the libraries. In Carpentras, a regional centre, a new one has opened in the restored Hôtel-Dieu. Portraits and landscapes hang on the walls, recalling old masters. A robot dispenses information. The furniture is spare and elegant. The mix of old and new media works.
On Christmas Eve, Carpentras mounted “un grand spectacle,” in the town square, starring a colossal marionette and 10 minutes of fireworks. It cost money, but then, this country believes in culture.
As Canada contemplates its next 150 years, we should look less to our contested past, which shaded the celebrations of 2017, and more to the future. For the superb renovation of the Canadian History Hall of the Canadian Museum of History and more modest projects, we are grateful.
But that’s just a beginning. Countries have to build things — libraries, galleries, concert halls, museums, railways and bridges. Canada has not nearly enough of them for the creative, prosperous society it is. Once again, the old world instructs the new.