Word: architect
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...from a given period, it has no equal. One is used to museums that get things three-quarters right and implore the visitor to be sanguine about their unrealized hopes. None of that is needed at Orsay. On every level, starting with the creative intelligence its designer, the Italian architect Gae Aulenti, has brought to the hard task of converting a dead station into a live museum and finishing with the range and stature of its collections, the museum is exemplary. It shows what state patronage can do. Nothing the private sector could summon up, in or out of France...
...Paris Commune of 1871, its melancholy, fire-gutted ruins remained untouched for nearly 30 years. Then, in 1898, the Orleans railroad company bought the site and raised on it a railroad station with a built-in hotel, serving as the terminus of lines from southwestern France. Its architect, Victor Laloux (1850-1937), did not approach the genius of men like Charles Garnier, who created the Paris Opera, and Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, France's supreme engineer. But he gave the Gare d'Orsay all he had, and that, backed by the decorative and engineering resources of fin de siecle Paris...
...Orsay had its architect, and the choice held its own cultural significance. Not only would Orsay be directed by a woman, but it would be designed by one: Gae Aulenti. In the U.S., where no woman architect has ever had such a commission and only one major museum (the Philadelphia Museum of Art) has a woman director, this would have been seen as a major feminist victory. The French press hardly commented on it: a real meritocracy takes sexual equality for granted...
...minor intellectual nobility," Aulenti, 59, honed her sense of design during ten years on the staff of the architectural magazine Casabella, and made her name as a designer in 1969 with her Olivetti showrooms in Paris and Buenos Aires. "In one way, she's a great success as an architect," says Italy's leading architecture critic, Bruno Zevi, who considers her work inspired and sensitive. "In another, she's unsuccessful -- up to now her work has been limited to various forms of 're': refurbishing, renovating, recycling." But after Orsay, there is no doubt that Aulenti -- who lists her primary modernist...
...stand in the sculpture-avenue between them, savoring the confrontation, framed in their respective portals, of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'Herbe with Degas's Bellelli Family, each the masterpiece of its maker's youth, is to receive a museum experience of a very high order. Lucky the architect who can collaborate...