collage42 -Pia-Vittoria
Toronto: Ideal city
The Ideal City of the US was painted by American artist Matt Mullican, whose work has often dealt with the interaction between public sign systems and personal symbols.
Matt Mullican, 1951 born in Santa Monica, Ca, United States He Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
In Lyon the walls tell stories, mostly very tall tales. While painting on walls is as old as time, the city has taken the art of modern urban wall painting to new heights with nearly 60 outdoor murals. Some are breathtaking flights of fancy; others are marvelous examples of trompe l'oeil, depictions of everyday life so realistic you could almost walk into them.
The murals produced by CitéCréation were designed not just as decoration but to help the people of Lyon rediscover their local identity, to trace the history of a particular quartier, or district, and to make art accessible to everyone. One of the best examples is the Musée Urbain Tony Garnier. The outdoor "museum" comprises 30 huge murals, painted on the buildings of an HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré) a low-rent housing project in the Etats-Unis district of Lyon.
The apartment buildings were originally designed by French architect Tony Garnier between 1920 and 1933, part of his dream of a modern, industrial urban utopia. But by the 1980s the district was in trouble, and drugs and violence were rife. In a bid to rehabilitate the area, the residents contacted CitéCréation, and work on the murals began soon after. It was a major success. "It completely transformed the quartier," says Bensaïd. "You can stop anyone on the street there and the response will be unanimous. It has given something back to the residents—pride—a word that can be both terrible and very beautiful. When we give pride to a space, a space which didn't exist for the rest of the town before, for the media, we feel we have succeeded." The surrounding district was renamed Cité Tony Garnier.
A dozen or so of the Musée Urbain murals—each some 2,500 square feet—are gigantic views of an industrial city rich with collective housing, schools, factories and clinics. A few of the murals show some of Garnier's other architectural contributions to Lyon, including the Abattoirs de la Mouche, a huge covered meat market with a ceiling of intricate metal arches. And eight of them show conceptions of the ideal city by eight artists, each from a different country: India, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Russia, Mexico, China, Canada and the United States.
Toronto: Ideal city
The Ideal City of the US was painted by American artist Matt Mullican, whose work has often dealt with the interaction between public sign systems and personal symbols.
Matt Mullican, 1951 born in Santa Monica, Ca, United States He Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
In Lyon the walls tell stories, mostly very tall tales. While painting on walls is as old as time, the city has taken the art of modern urban wall painting to new heights with nearly 60 outdoor murals. Some are breathtaking flights of fancy; others are marvelous examples of trompe l'oeil, depictions of everyday life so realistic you could almost walk into them.
The murals produced by CitéCréation were designed not just as decoration but to help the people of Lyon rediscover their local identity, to trace the history of a particular quartier, or district, and to make art accessible to everyone. One of the best examples is the Musée Urbain Tony Garnier. The outdoor "museum" comprises 30 huge murals, painted on the buildings of an HLM (Habitation à Loyer Modéré) a low-rent housing project in the Etats-Unis district of Lyon.
The apartment buildings were originally designed by French architect Tony Garnier between 1920 and 1933, part of his dream of a modern, industrial urban utopia. But by the 1980s the district was in trouble, and drugs and violence were rife. In a bid to rehabilitate the area, the residents contacted CitéCréation, and work on the murals began soon after. It was a major success. "It completely transformed the quartier," says Bensaïd. "You can stop anyone on the street there and the response will be unanimous. It has given something back to the residents—pride—a word that can be both terrible and very beautiful. When we give pride to a space, a space which didn't exist for the rest of the town before, for the media, we feel we have succeeded." The surrounding district was renamed Cité Tony Garnier.
A dozen or so of the Musée Urbain murals—each some 2,500 square feet—are gigantic views of an industrial city rich with collective housing, schools, factories and clinics. A few of the murals show some of Garnier's other architectural contributions to Lyon, including the Abattoirs de la Mouche, a huge covered meat market with a ceiling of intricate metal arches. And eight of them show conceptions of the ideal city by eight artists, each from a different country: India, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Russia, Mexico, China, Canada and the United States.