Le Centre Pompidou à Metz
French Listening Comprehension
Study Guide
Take a look at the following for help with any vocabulary and grammar that you might not
have understood in Le Centre Pompidou à Metz, then take
the test.
| Vocabulary | |
| aboutir à | to lead to, result in, end up with |
| amont | uphill, preliminary |
| antan | yesteryear, long ago |
| un chantier | project, construction site |
| léguer | to bequeath, pass on |
| une maquette | scale model |
| messin | (adj) relating to Metz |
| la préfiguration | foreshadowing |
| prétendre | to claim |
| rayonner | to shine |
| une réplique | replica |
| subitement | suddenly |
| la toiture | roof |
| voire | or even, indeed |
| Notes | |
| Catherine Trautmann |
Catherine Trautmann, presently a member of the European Parliament, was the minister of Culture in the last Socialist government, which was turned out of office in 2002. Her replacement was the elegant Jean-Jacques Aillagon. |
| Centre Pompidou à Metz | You can see the winning design by clicking on the link to the left. |
| Forbach | Forbach, a former mining town of 170,000 inhabitants, is about 40 miles from Metz, more or less on the German border. (The whole region was part of Germany from 1870 to 1918.) The town claims to be the ancestral home of the Eisenhower family. |
| Guggenheim | The Guggenheim Museum of New York has satellite museums not just in Bilbao, but also in Venice, Berlin, and Las Vegas—and hopes for others in Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Establishing satellite museums like these is becoming a strategy of several major institutions. In Britain, for example, the Tate has branches in Liverpool and St. Ives, as well as Tate Modern in London. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has an outpost in Japan, and Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has a small gallery at Schiphol airport. Meanwhile, in France news of the Metz Pompidou Center has been followed by the announcement of plans to set up a second Louvre in the northern town of Lens in 2009. The projects represent a gradual trend toward regionalization in France—but they will also allow curators to display works that have mostly languished in storage. The Pompidou center is also in the bidding to operate the future West Kowloon cultural district in Hong Kong, where one of its rivals is the Guggenheim. |
| Jean-Jacques Aillagon | Jean-Jacques Aillagon, a veteran arts administator who since 1996 had been president of what is officially called the Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture. What the text does not mention is that Monsieur Aillagon was himself from Metz. Whether that was a factor in the choice of Metz as the location for the satellite museum is anyone's guess. One cannot help but wonder. It sounds a little suspicious when the city's mayor claims that all the other candidates happily ruled themselves out on one pretext or another. Aillagon left government in a reshuffle in March 2004 and was replaced by Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres. |
| Shigeru Ban |
Shigeru Ban is by far the most famous of the three architects whose design was chosen. He is best-known for his use of innovative materials like cardboard and paper tubing, and his designs for cheap housing for victims of the Kobe earthquake in 1995 led to a permanent consultancy with the U.N. refugee agency. Models for the new project at Metz are dominated by the building's giant, curving roof, reportedly inspired by a Chinese peasant's woven bamboo hat. Inside, cantilevered steel tubes, measuring 300 by 50 feet, form the basis of the three galleries, and the building will be surrounded by movable glass shutters that can be closed or open to the surrounding gardens. The whole area, named the "amphitheater site" after the Roman remains found there, is currently being redeveloped. |
| Le Centre Pompidou à Metz French Listening Comprehension Exercise |
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| Listen | Study | Test | ||
| Transcript Translation | ||||
| Sound files and transcript
were
originally published in Champs-Élysées audiomagazine (read my review) and are used with the permission of Champs-Élysées, Inc. |
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| Listening Index French Dictionaries | ||||
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