The Swimming Pool that Turned into a Museum



The city of Lille, France had a beautiful municipal swimming pool. It was an Art Deco masterpiece built between 1927 and 1932 by the architect Albert Baert. But over the years, the support underneath the pool was weakened, and it was declared unsafe in 1985. Instead of abandoning the building, the city undertook an extensive renovation project, turning the facility into a museum called the La Piscine-Musée d'Art et d'Industrie André Diligent. The locals just call it La Piscine. See more pictures of this beautiful building at Kuriositas. Link

(Image credit: Flickr member graham chandler)

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It's easy to be a critic of something that doesn't have a will. My area of criticism would be that this was all generated as the result of human ignorance. There is really no need of or inherent beauty in any sculpted thing. I wouldn't even begin to criticize it in the way ted has because it's irrelevant. If I happened to be a "Particularly awful.. unflattering.. nasty-looking nobility." I might very well be offended. ted is pretty safe saying what he is saying and nobody picking up on any "offense" because you simply can't relate to the object of his criticism.
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Reminiscent of the Canopus at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli. Lovely building, but the statues appear to be those second-rate, pedestrian things, flawless in execution but of no redeeming artistic value. Sort of like statues one might find mass-produced for the graveside, or like the horribly ugly ones at the entrance to the Uffizi in Florence - if still there.
Those were particularly awful, being unflattering busts of some nasty-looking nobility.

One was in porphyry, which, to me, is just a horrible medium to sculpt in. Maybe it was the hideous porphyry statue in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, with its grotesquely giant-sized head, that put me off. I tend to think it was the colour more than anything.

These pale in comparison, but the idea of the bewigged French nobility sitting calmly next to two sets of Mary and Baby Jesus, beside the pool, seems a little ludicrous. The mise en scene is a noble effort, but falls short of its intended goal.

There. How's that for verbiage?
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