It is striking to discover the unabashedly futuristic architecture of spectacle of the Zenith concert halls cropping up on the outskirts of French towns and cities often best known for the soaring spires of their Gothic cathedrals.The nation’s effusive embrace of modernity and mass culture does indeed generate unexpected juxtapositions with the architectural artifacts of its past. This pronounced disconnect between the contemporary concert hall and the medieval church may be unintentional, but it seems to underscore France’s desire both to acknowledge its historic patrimony and establish a critical distance from it. Bernard Tschumi compellingly emphasized the dichotomy between the two cultures with his concert hall in Rouen, whose 13th-century cathedral provided a mesmerizing subject for the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. While Tschumi refined his concert hall design with different materials for the Zenith in Limoges, Massimiliano and Doriana Fuksas further accentuate and celebrate the schism between the two time periods and architectural types with their own Zenith music hall outside Strasbourg. Their colorfully jaunty design offers a cheeky correlative to the late-13th-century Gothic cathedral, famous for a delicate vertical structure that inspired encomia from both Goethe and Laugier.
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