‘Metropolitan Opera House, Philadelphia’
TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when the world was upside down, Romantic poets strapped on knapsacks and went to dream amid ruins: the Coliseum, the Acropolis, Tintern Abbey. Places of melancholy pleasure. Places that exposed the mutability of powers, empires, ideas.
Photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre grew up in the concrete southern suburbs of Paris. They met in 2002, when Marchand was 21 and Meffre 15. Good Romantic ages. Instead of Greece and Rome, they flew to Detroit and photographed the carcasses of its public buildings. They explored the unpeopled corridors of Gunkanjima—a derelict mining colony in the South China Sea, built at such density that it reshaped its host island into a brutalist battleship. They also developed an eye for the deconsecrated cathedrals of American entertainment: the rococo supercinema surrendered to mold and entropy, the theater repurposed as a mattress store. And this—the auditorium of the Philadelphia Metropolitan Opera House, where no phantom seems necessary.
“Abandoned buildings have a special smell,” say the photographers, in a joint email. “They breathe out cold air from their rotting wood and carpets. You can sometimes feel it from outside.” The light, streaming up through the plastic sheeting over the orchestra pit, is not natural but comes from a bank of neon lights installed on the floor below. “It looked to us,” they say, “like some kind of art-and-craft fake sea from a Michel Gondry movie.”
The Met was built in 1908, commissioned by Oscar Hammerstein, grandfather of the lyricist. Opera did not detain it for long. By the 1920s, it was a cinema. By 1940, a venue for wrestling and basketball. Between 1954 and 2016, church groups were its owners. Now a $35 million redevelopment is promised by a developer, as $35 million redevelopments are.
Would Marchand and Meffre like to see this building restored to its former glory? They would. But wouldn’t that destroy its present glory? “We like the natural erosion of time on structures,” they reply. “We like reading different layers and perceiving different temporalities. It creates conflicting emotions. It makes it much more moving.”
They’re right. Let us have opera. But let us also have ruins.
“ABANDONED BUILDINGS HAVE A SPECIAL SMELL.”