Friday, October 15, 2021 3:38:01 PM
>>> How France Turned the Humble Roundabout Into a Showcase for Art
From children’s boats to snails and a giant thumb, the spaces drivers pass around are now islands of creativity.
Bloomberg
Gaelle Faure
October 9, 2021
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-09/how-france-turned-the-humble-roundabout-into-a-showcase-for-art
"L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped" in Paris, a posthumous project from artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Thousands of visitors recently flocked to France’s most famous roundabout — Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris — to see its centerpiece Arc de Triomphe wrapped in fabric by the late artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
But, away from international crowds, there are myriad lesser known projects that dot the islands of more humble traffic circles across France. A construction frenzy in recent decades to reduce accidents opened up the opportunity for creativity: how to use tens of thousands of empty spaces that range in diameter from just a few meters to the length of two soccer fields.
Rather than simply filling them with drab concrete or a bit of landscaping, many towns have turned to public art. Usually in the form of oversized sculptures — and sometimes not without their critics — works range from the quaint to the surreal, from the nostalgic to the aspirational.
Drivers get to look at a chair fit for a giant, a snail admiring itself in a mirror, a winged man about to take flight, a chain-link tower of Babel, or disembodied hands prying open an oyster. Or at least they get to try and figure out what they are in the short time it takes to drive around them.
The paper boats by artist Jean-Luc Plé in La Tremblade, France.
“Municipalities jumped at the chance to showcase a local identity and create a sort of postcard image to commemorate the past, for example if they were once a mining town or a fishing village — or, on the contrary, they might try to play up their modernity,” said Éric Alonzo, an architecture professor who has written books on the history of the roundabout and the architecture of roads.
One example is La Tremblade on France’s Atlantic coast. In 2004, Jean-Pierre Tallieu, the mayor at the time, was faced with an empty circle of dirt to fill after the regional government built a roundabout on a road running through his town.
He wanted to complement the local beaches visited by families, something to “stick in children’s minds.” “I came up with the idea of building big paper boats—the kind we all learn to make as kids, using lined paper from school,” he said. Today, tourists stop to take pictures and locals use the boats when giving directions.
The artist behind the sculpture is Jean-Luc Plé, who is often described as the “king of roundabouts.” A former Renault factory worker turned commercial sculpture maker, he then segued into roundabout art, creating dozens of pieces across the country.
Artist Jean-Luc Plé’s famous snail sculpture on the Lorignac roundabout, France.
Before embarking on a project, Plé has a chat with the local mayors and asks them what their town celebrates, what its story is. “Sometimes they’re not sure, but then you dig a bit and it turns out that they might produce the most beautiful snails,” he said.
He then draws up several ideas before they agree on a price, which he says can range from 30,000 to 50,000 euros ($34,700 to $57,800). All his pieces are made of polyurethane foam, meaning that should a car crash into them, the material will safely disintegrate. His next roundabout project is a giant hot air balloon, which will soon go up in Val des Vignes, a town in the southwest that hosts a ballooning competition.
Learning about a place through its roundabout art is part of what fascinates collectors like Yang Xiao, a Chinese photographer and designer who lives in Spain. Yang has taken more than 2,200 screenshots from Google Street View, cataloging them on a worldwide map and sharing her favorites on Instagram in an ongoing project that picked up speed during Covid-19 lockdowns.
She divided them into categories such as religion, the military, industry, agriculture or famous people, food and sports. Based on her online travels, she said Spain and France seem to have the greatest store of roundabout art and that developed countries tend to have more contemporary sculptures.
Her favorite in France is what looks like an aluminum plane, created in 2004 in Gometz-la-Ville in the southern suburbs of Paris. It’s an homage to the inventor of the Aérotrain, a hovertrain prototype tested in the 1960s but scrapped in favor of developing the country’s rapid rail network.
The sculpture in Gometz-la-Ville, France.
“The airplane is a very popular topic for roundabout sculpture,” she said. “Many countries have it, but this one is the most beautiful to me.”
France could well be the world champion in roundabouts, but the truth is nobody knows exactly how many there are. There are no precise figures because there’s no central system for authorizing or tracking them, according to Marina Louvet, spokesperson for Cerema, a public agency that studies the country’s road network.
The only recent attempt at an estimate comes from the blog Beyond the Maps, which used OpenStreetMap data to calculate the number of roundabouts across Europe. France came out on top, with more than 65,000 roundabouts as of 2018 — by far the highest total.
Professor Alonzo’s book retraces how, long before the advent of the automobile, roundabouts were prevalent in French gardens such as at the castle of Versailles, and how at the start of the 20th century, the modern roundabout — with one-way-traffic — was simultaneously invented in France and in the U.S.
The system was later perfected in the U.K., giving right-of-way to cars within the roundabout, and in the mid-1980s began spreading like wildfire in France. At the same time, the country was decentralizing, which gave local authorities more control. “They were able to hit two birds with one stone: create new roads that improved safety and also decorate them as they liked,” Alonzo said.
David Worthington, a British artist and lecturer who built a sculpture of a UFO on a roundabout in the English coastal city of Southampton, also points to France’s long tradition of investment in the arts. “France’s history of patronage, from the salons to today, ties in to why nearly each village now has its own sculptural commission,” he said.
Le Pouce sculpture in Marseille, France.
Roundabout art has its share of critics in France, with some decrying the use of public funds, and others disparaging the sculptures as eyesores. A lobby group representing taxpayers even held a contest for the “worst roundabout in France.”
Others are more measured. Joëlle Zask, a philosophy professor who wrote a book on outdoor art, doesn’t see roundabouts as generally conducive to creating successful pieces of public art. “It’s a space that is isolated, inaccessible to the public,” she said.
Still, there are some roundabout pieces that Zask appreciates because they relate their surroundings. César’s giant thumb in the city of Marseille makes her think of a hitchhiker. She also likes Patrick Raynaud’s carousel of road signs in Villeurbanne next door to Lyon that points haphazardly to cities across the world.
Raynaud’s piece is frequently cited as a success, but it was not always loved. When it was first installed in 1989, replacing several flower boxes, locals defaced it in protest.
“But it caused a lot of discussion, and after a few months, the same people who’d protested went to the mayor and said, ‘let’s just put the flower boxes in the street and bring back the sculpture’,” Raynaud says. “So we gladly rebuilt it.”
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From children’s boats to snails and a giant thumb, the spaces drivers pass around are now islands of creativity.
Bloomberg
Gaelle Faure
October 9, 2021
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-09/how-france-turned-the-humble-roundabout-into-a-showcase-for-art
"L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped" in Paris, a posthumous project from artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Thousands of visitors recently flocked to France’s most famous roundabout — Place Charles de Gaulle in Paris — to see its centerpiece Arc de Triomphe wrapped in fabric by the late artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
But, away from international crowds, there are myriad lesser known projects that dot the islands of more humble traffic circles across France. A construction frenzy in recent decades to reduce accidents opened up the opportunity for creativity: how to use tens of thousands of empty spaces that range in diameter from just a few meters to the length of two soccer fields.
Rather than simply filling them with drab concrete or a bit of landscaping, many towns have turned to public art. Usually in the form of oversized sculptures — and sometimes not without their critics — works range from the quaint to the surreal, from the nostalgic to the aspirational.
Drivers get to look at a chair fit for a giant, a snail admiring itself in a mirror, a winged man about to take flight, a chain-link tower of Babel, or disembodied hands prying open an oyster. Or at least they get to try and figure out what they are in the short time it takes to drive around them.
The paper boats by artist Jean-Luc Plé in La Tremblade, France.
“Municipalities jumped at the chance to showcase a local identity and create a sort of postcard image to commemorate the past, for example if they were once a mining town or a fishing village — or, on the contrary, they might try to play up their modernity,” said Éric Alonzo, an architecture professor who has written books on the history of the roundabout and the architecture of roads.
One example is La Tremblade on France’s Atlantic coast. In 2004, Jean-Pierre Tallieu, the mayor at the time, was faced with an empty circle of dirt to fill after the regional government built a roundabout on a road running through his town.
He wanted to complement the local beaches visited by families, something to “stick in children’s minds.” “I came up with the idea of building big paper boats—the kind we all learn to make as kids, using lined paper from school,” he said. Today, tourists stop to take pictures and locals use the boats when giving directions.
The artist behind the sculpture is Jean-Luc Plé, who is often described as the “king of roundabouts.” A former Renault factory worker turned commercial sculpture maker, he then segued into roundabout art, creating dozens of pieces across the country.
Artist Jean-Luc Plé’s famous snail sculpture on the Lorignac roundabout, France.
Before embarking on a project, Plé has a chat with the local mayors and asks them what their town celebrates, what its story is. “Sometimes they’re not sure, but then you dig a bit and it turns out that they might produce the most beautiful snails,” he said.
He then draws up several ideas before they agree on a price, which he says can range from 30,000 to 50,000 euros ($34,700 to $57,800). All his pieces are made of polyurethane foam, meaning that should a car crash into them, the material will safely disintegrate. His next roundabout project is a giant hot air balloon, which will soon go up in Val des Vignes, a town in the southwest that hosts a ballooning competition.
Learning about a place through its roundabout art is part of what fascinates collectors like Yang Xiao, a Chinese photographer and designer who lives in Spain. Yang has taken more than 2,200 screenshots from Google Street View, cataloging them on a worldwide map and sharing her favorites on Instagram in an ongoing project that picked up speed during Covid-19 lockdowns.
She divided them into categories such as religion, the military, industry, agriculture or famous people, food and sports. Based on her online travels, she said Spain and France seem to have the greatest store of roundabout art and that developed countries tend to have more contemporary sculptures.
Her favorite in France is what looks like an aluminum plane, created in 2004 in Gometz-la-Ville in the southern suburbs of Paris. It’s an homage to the inventor of the Aérotrain, a hovertrain prototype tested in the 1960s but scrapped in favor of developing the country’s rapid rail network.
The sculpture in Gometz-la-Ville, France.
“The airplane is a very popular topic for roundabout sculpture,” she said. “Many countries have it, but this one is the most beautiful to me.”
France could well be the world champion in roundabouts, but the truth is nobody knows exactly how many there are. There are no precise figures because there’s no central system for authorizing or tracking them, according to Marina Louvet, spokesperson for Cerema, a public agency that studies the country’s road network.
The only recent attempt at an estimate comes from the blog Beyond the Maps, which used OpenStreetMap data to calculate the number of roundabouts across Europe. France came out on top, with more than 65,000 roundabouts as of 2018 — by far the highest total.
Professor Alonzo’s book retraces how, long before the advent of the automobile, roundabouts were prevalent in French gardens such as at the castle of Versailles, and how at the start of the 20th century, the modern roundabout — with one-way-traffic — was simultaneously invented in France and in the U.S.
The system was later perfected in the U.K., giving right-of-way to cars within the roundabout, and in the mid-1980s began spreading like wildfire in France. At the same time, the country was decentralizing, which gave local authorities more control. “They were able to hit two birds with one stone: create new roads that improved safety and also decorate them as they liked,” Alonzo said.
David Worthington, a British artist and lecturer who built a sculpture of a UFO on a roundabout in the English coastal city of Southampton, also points to France’s long tradition of investment in the arts. “France’s history of patronage, from the salons to today, ties in to why nearly each village now has its own sculptural commission,” he said.
Le Pouce sculpture in Marseille, France.
Roundabout art has its share of critics in France, with some decrying the use of public funds, and others disparaging the sculptures as eyesores. A lobby group representing taxpayers even held a contest for the “worst roundabout in France.”
Others are more measured. Joëlle Zask, a philosophy professor who wrote a book on outdoor art, doesn’t see roundabouts as generally conducive to creating successful pieces of public art. “It’s a space that is isolated, inaccessible to the public,” she said.
Still, there are some roundabout pieces that Zask appreciates because they relate their surroundings. César’s giant thumb in the city of Marseille makes her think of a hitchhiker. She also likes Patrick Raynaud’s carousel of road signs in Villeurbanne next door to Lyon that points haphazardly to cities across the world.
Raynaud’s piece is frequently cited as a success, but it was not always loved. When it was first installed in 1989, replacing several flower boxes, locals defaced it in protest.
“But it caused a lot of discussion, and after a few months, the same people who’d protested went to the mayor and said, ‘let’s just put the flower boxes in the street and bring back the sculpture’,” Raynaud says. “So we gladly rebuilt it.”
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