Opening of the Musée du Louvre Lens

In 2004, the French Minister of Culture presented a list of northern towns that were selected to have a "branch" of the Louvre, which had started a decentralization policy aimed at creating development opportunities in declining areas of the country. The preference went to Lens, a formerly important mining town, which was currently affected by a very bad economic and social crisis. Although the Louvre was not the first museum that decentralized its holding among depressed areas – it was preceded by the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, and more recently the Centre Pompidou in Metz, such a contrast between the great art that Lens was going to host and the lowliness of the context was ground-breaking.

The Louvre-Lens will be officially inaugurated on December 4th, St. Barbara's day, the patron saint of miners.

The museum was designed by Japanese design firm SANAA, in collaboration with Imrey Culbert and Mosbach. The single-floor structure stands in the heart of the town, in what was once the courtyard of the mine, now transformed into a park. The complex is formed by five intercommunicating buildings, four rectangular ones and a square one, whose layout looks like the stretched plan of the Louvre in Paris.

The glass and aluminium structures create a dynamic relationship with the surrounding landscape: sometimes, they let the visitor enjoy large views of the mounds of debris characterizing the landscape of the former mining site, some other times they reflect the greenery of the park, in a continuous game of ever-changing suggestions and emotions, according to the light or season.

There are three exhibition spaces. A unit, the Galerie du Temps, is destined to show in rotation 250 works from the Louvre, mixing masterpieces from the 4th century before Christ to the 19th century (the most fragile masterpieces, like the Venus de Milo and the Mona Lisa will be spared a trip to the mining area).

Works of all ages and cultures will be exhibited side by side, with the purpose of becoming a new way to experience the visit to a museum.

Two other units, instead, will be dedicated to temporary exhibitions. The Batiment 2, in particular, will be destined to great exhibitions (two of them are planned every year), starting from the opening exhibition dedicated to the Renaissance.
The Pavillon de Verre, instead, will be the venue of temporary exhibitions linked to the territory where the museum stands, that is the Nord-Pas de Calais region.

Goppion has made the entire outfitting for the Louvre-Lens, which consists of as many as 242 elements (showcases, furniture, desks, supports). Special, custom-made showcases are mixed with time-tested showcases of the Goppion Q System. The design philosophy of Sanaa, characterized by a sophisticated minimalism, was also a challenge for Goppion. Research and testing oriented towards small-sized, yet very strong materials. So, showcases are characterized by extreme pureness of shapes and volumes, and the perfection of joints and corners.
Very thin, yet high-efficiency hinges fully hid the opening systems.

The predominant colour is white, in its several shades and tints: the only exception is found in the rooms dedicated to the exhibition on Renaissance, where aged natural ashwood display elements contrast with the background of softly painted red, blue and yellow walls.

The final effect is the total abstraction of the works from the place where they are kept: the artworks stand out in all their formal and symbolic pureness, suspended in time and space, deliberately taken out of context.