Monacopolis

At the two magnificent venues of Villa Paloma and Villa Sauber, an exhibition examines fifty years of urban planning and development in Monaco,with extensive documentation bearing the collective signature of hundreds of artist and architects.

Monaco is steeped in stereotypes, among which a perceived architectural heritage and cultural life that races faster than Formula 1, a circus festival and, more generally speaking, the unshakeable tarnish of all those media stories.

Now, an exhibition entitled Monacopolis, on show in the two magnificent venues of Villa Paloma and Villa Sauber, is seeking to harness the Principality's cultural resources via careful investigation and excellent exhibition-design ideas by Martino Gamper and Maki Suzuki who in a fine — humble and almost non-authorial — gesture stepped back and chose a setting that highlights and makes the painstaking work of curator Nathalie Giordano–Rosticher legible and highly enjoyable after she gathered, saved and often reassembled an enormous mass of archive material. Plans, photographs, models, objects and conduct had regrettably become mute evidence, often because poorly conserved and sometimes simply forgotten in the stores of what was to be the Museum of Modern Art — from the 12-metre panorama of the Monte Carlo skyline painted in oil for the 1900 Paris World's Fair to photographs of Eric von Stroheim's sets — which reconstruct Monaco's central square to scale 1:1 in the California desert and resemble a contemporary piece of Land Art, falling somewhere between Marfa and Walter De Maria's lightning in the desert. The idea of stabilising and forming a permanent collection has allowed these archives to tell new stories and bring a different kind of visibility to one of Europe's richest and most creative places.

Top and above: <em>Monacopolis:
Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012</em>, installation view at Villa Paloma, NMNM, Monaco. Above, on the foreground,
Model by Christian de Portzamparc, <em>Tours
Moulins et Madone</em>, 2001. Background, Philipe Cognée, <em>Monaco</em>, 2008. Collection NMNM — Top and above: *Monacopolis: Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012*, installation view at Villa Paloma, NMNM, Monaco. Above, on the foreground, Model by Christian de Portzamparc, *Tours Moulins et Madone*, 2001. Background, Philipe Cognée, *Monaco*, 2008. Collection NMNM

The exhibition does not deal only with architectural and residential buildings but also channels all the glamour of these locations. It looks at cinema and, albeit in the absence of an iconic Grace Kelly, pulls together the revolution in the Russian ballet, the innovations in theatre and visual arts, and even the creation of a contemporary concept of tourism. It is, in fact, undeniable that the concept of a tourist's perception of the world inspired the workshop behind the widespread planning practices of the last two centuries, from Las Vegas to Shanghai.

<em>Monacopolis:
Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012</em>, installation view at Villa Paloma, NMNM, Monaco. Paul Maymont (1926-2007), <em>Thalassa, Etude de ville flottante pour la
Principauté de Monaco</em>, 1962 — *Monacopolis: Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012*, installation view at Villa Paloma, NMNM, Monaco. Paul Maymont (1926-2007), *Thalassa, Etude de ville flottante pour la Principauté de Monaco*, 1962

Monacopolis does not simply scrutinize projects that seem to find immediate parallels in the "copy and paste" urban-planning approach of the Arab Emirates. Cities such as Dubai or Abu Dhabi might well want to resemble the Principality, but the specific ideas that often appear in the Far East seem drawn from the inventory of what was not built in Monaco. Moreover, they have found clients, buyers and perhaps the bare-faced complicity of future and invulnerable global capital investment.

The colour of the architectural blueprints inspired not only the exhibition's carpets but also the institutional communication

In Monaco, plans for dams, tunnels, floating islands and certain colossal projects occupy shop-windows and land-registry files and, although often enchanting, they were rejected by a monarchy that is less banana-republic than you might think, and that has not twisted and distorted the morphology of that dreamlike landscape that is the French Riviera. It is via this Monacopolis, the focus of a careful and committed study of its heritage, that we can judge the Archigram utopia and Garnier's late modernity rather than the most secret and cult-like creative implications of Ponti's high-ranking skyscrapers. Splendid documentation, laid out in equally splendid transparent drawers, reflects the identity of the residential dream, bearing the collective signature of the expertise of hundreds of artist and architects, ranging from Yona Friedman's utopias for a Monaco-like Venice to the technical construction models of museum structures, from the Oceanographic Museum to the Pavillon Bosio.

This is almost an exhibition-atelier, for which the Monaco Ecole Superieure d'Art Plastique provided specific skills during the restoration period, and more. The school, which specialises in teaching set design, proved a precious resource and, indeed, it was at a workshop in this art school that Martino Gamper met Nathalie Rosticher. Together with Maki Suzuki of åbäke, they started custom-designing a display for the entire collection. During a talk at the Hotel Metropole, organised by the Monaco Project for the Arts, they unveiled the behind-the-scenes and intrinsic minimalism of the design, the starting point of which was the fragility of certain materials in the collection, as too the prevalence of paper and photographs, materials and media so dear to the architecture of the old.

The colour of the architectural blueprints inspired not only the exhibition's carpets but also the institutional communication — posters, billboards and catalogue. The display is completed with a few original furnishings but the rest is all anodised extruded aluminium and transparent drawers, an extremely simple and functional coordinated system reminiscent of Philip Johnson's iron and glass Glass House.

Here are two collections, one with a more historical perspective in Villa Sauber, and one with a more recent focus in Villa Paloma, in which you have the impression of moving through a very special archive. Outside is the beauty of a stretch of the French Riviera, and inside works by Peter Cook, Archigram and Garnier, designs for airports, bridges, tunnels, skyscrapers with sea views, and metaphysical interiors like those in Thomas Demand's photographs and Gabriele Basilico's black and white ones. All happily visited by the Principality's Glamorama ghost. Ivo Bonacorsi

Through 12 May 2013
Monacopolis: Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012
NMNM — Villa Paloma
56, boulevard du Jardin Exotique, Monaco

Through December 2013
Monacopolis: Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012
NMNM — Villa Sauber
17, avenue Princesse Grace, Monaco

<em>Monacopolis: Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012</em>, installation view at Villa Sauber, NMNM, Monaco. The Montecarlo opera — *Monacopolis: Architecture, Urbanism et Urbanisation in Monaco, Realisations et Projects – 1858-2012*, installation view at Villa Sauber, NMNM, Monaco. The Montecarlo opera

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Monacopolis

At the two magnificent venues of Villa Paloma and Villa Sauber, an exhibition examines fifty years of urban planning and development in Monaco,with extensive documentation bearing the collective signature of hundreds of artist and architects.

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