Function comes back into form

Like Liverpool, Lille’s got centuries of it: acres of 17th-century gabled merchants’ houses, a portly beaux arts opera house, the vast Flemish-Gothic Chambre de Commerce. Like Liverpool, too, it tried to rebrand itself years ago, with new buildings that doubled as logos on the tourism website, by avant-garde architects nobody had heard of. France has always been terrifically good at state provision of culture, from Louis XIV to Mitterrand. That’s why we call grands projets grands projets. But France also knows more than most countries about the limitations of spectacle without good form or function. Many of Paris’s modern icons, like the Louvre Pyramide and the Pompidou, still charm. Many others — the pointless Grande Arche de la Défense, the gruesome Bastille opera house, Les Halles, that Dante-esque hellhole in 1970s silver lamé — do not.

Lille had plenty of culture for The People. What it lacked was culture for the people (no capitals): the North Africans, Senegalese, the ordinary working class who had been booted out of their jobs when the textile mills scarpered to Asia. And in a left-wing city, birthplace of the socialist anthem The Internationale, with 40 per cent unemployment still scorched in its memory — you forget the people at your peril.

For 2004 it has done all the usual stuff: scrubbing up the heritage, blockbuster art exhibitions (Rubens), those slightly annoying street-art spectacles that give work to the legions of professional Dadaists who pile out of art school these days. But what stops it being just another tourist jamboree (five million visitors and counting) is the radical work going on under the surface.

The grand projet is dead. Long live the petit projet! The Maisons Folies, 12 community arts centres scattered across the hinterland, will be the legacy of 2004. These are what the mayor of Lille, Martine Aubry, calls “permanent projects”.

If the phrase “community arts” fills you with dread, fear not. No carrot-crunchers here. Instead, the Maisons house local TV studios, comic-strip galleries, beer festivals and free recording studios. They can embrace gardening, interior design and digital art, as well as conventional “high” art.

Maison Folie de Wazemmes, for example, has just opened a luxurious hammam after a vote by its local population. Each maison responds to what the quartier wants. The point, continues Stéphanie Campanie, the manager of the Wazemmes project, is to celebrate “l’art de vivre” as opposed to “lifestyle”. The intention is to weave art into everyday life, something at which the French excel.

The “maisons” are just that: homes from homes, or, as they say in their mission statement, “convivial places for meetings and family, artistic and festive exchanges”.

Like a home, they are casual kinds of places; you can drop in, hang out, be a passive spectator, or get your hands dirty. Like a home, each is chaotically busy. And like a home, their heart is the kitchen, which anyone can use.

The architecture is decidedly non-worthy, too. Only the Wazemmes Maison has gone for spectacle. Its Dutch architect, Lars Spuybroek from Nox, is one of Europe’s rising stars, and comes with splendid complex intellectual ideas about the radical possibilities of architectural form freed by digital technology from the yoke of dull old bricks and mortar. To the quartier’s red-brick 19th-century textile mill he has added a fat black concrete box, dressed in a ballooning chiffon chain-mail which wobbles like flesh to the touch. Great idea. Looks marvellous on the computer. But, alas, in reality, it’s a bit low-tech and scruffy. Still, one day reality will catch up.

The other Maisons have gone for a mix of modern and old — the French are awfully good at this. Think rationalist steel and glass, always in a grid, not a curve, and not a blob in sight.

Not radical, not terrifically exciting, but high quality, and to the point. (The point is the activity that goes on inside, not the architecture.) Most reuse loved local buildings whose point has long since gone: in Maubeuge, a 17th-century gate by that master of defence, Vauban; in Moulins, a pretty 18th-century brewery, all Flemish gables, hearty bricks and fat render like crème patisserie. Villeneuve d’Asq’s La Ferme d’en haut, an 18th-century farm now swallowed up in suburbia, has been delicately converted by Quatr’A as a high-tech hippy: buffed-up old brick barns matched with sharp modern insertions — a polycarbonate box on stilts across the ghost of the farm’s old moat; an armour of steel grids thrown over the roof for creepers to colonise.

In Roubaix, Lille 2004 funded and supported La Condition Publique, an existing local arts group keen on converting the mill town’s vast derelict 1901 wool and silk exchange into a “culture factory”. The architect Patrick Bouchain has lightly converted it, weaving modern additions, such as a huge auditorium, into the old structure and decoration — pretty polychrome tiles, Eiffel-esque metal and glass galleries.

The vast impromptu meadow that had grown on the flat roofs this past century has been kept as a public garden and belvedere. The symbolism — the metamorphosis of space, function and economy from industrial production to cultural production — is subtly expressed.

The Maisons will perform a vital function when the 2004 circus leaves town — “cultural therapy”, helping local people to make sense of their home town’s transformation from industrial powerhouse to just another “crossroads of Europe”.

You can’t help wondering if our obsession with architectural projets, grands or petits, and cities of culture will, in the long term, ever really put baguettes on the table. Or is the spectacle just to mask a distinctly uncreative future for most, making espressos and padding out call centres? The centre of Lille might be frightfully smart these days, with its Hermès and Armani shops, but out in dusty Roubaix countless mill skeletons are “à louer”.