This is the entrance to the Musee de l’architecture et de la Ville in Lille, Northern France - a bare strip of concrete facing ..... 
.....this walkway with ....
... this on the opposite side ...
... it does have the odd cheery front door. Where does the walkway go you ask ?
It goes to Lille Europe one of the most miserable, windswept & depressing “plazas” in Western Europe.
The city as a place without warmth, soul or enclosure but of statement buildings & abandoned space. Rats ( yes these🐀 ) can be seen on a Saturday afternoon so thoroughly has the place failed. Travellers avoid coming here till they have to. It’s just depressing
If you want to go in the other direction (past the irony-free museum of architecture) you come to street as slab block...
Then abruptly the sheer grey facades stop & the old town breaks out. Suddenly there are people enjoying the shops & the town despite (yes) gilet jaune demonstrations & very cold weather
Then there is another station - Lille Flandres packed with people & life (external photo not taken today) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gare_de_L… No blank walls here but coherent detail, texture and variety in a pattern. Above all - activity
This is what you see when you arrive at Lille Flandres. Welcome to Lille it says - city of cloth fairs and prosperous commerce.
This is Lille’s Veille Bourse (spellcheck does NOT like French names). It’s role & history touches on much of city’s rich & complex history: a regional stock market, permitted by Philip IV of Spain (city was under Spanish rule for 149 yrs until reconquered by LouisXIV) it is...
... in the high Flemish renaissance style. It has a statue of Mercury ( God of commerce) on it & coats of arms of some of the large C19th regional companies follow a restoration. This is inside where trading took place.
(If we’re honest it slightly reminds us of old Playmobil houses - don’t tell anyone please.)
The French were very keen to get the city from the Habsburgs & it was besieged multiple times (here’s a map from 1641) until The☀️ 👑 (get it?) won it for France under the 1668 Treaty of Aix-La-Chapelle. (Here’s a map showing defences in 1641)
Trade & prosperity seems to have continued. Certainly, city kept growing. These beautiful high density townhouses (Le Rang du Beauregard) were built after rules for new buildings required uniformity with neighboring buildings, esp. Vielle Bourse, to a standard 5 storeys blueprint
That said due to geography, war was never far away. Apparently the black dots on this facade are Austrian cannonballs lodged in it during an 8 day siege after the French Revolution. (You might want to compare back to 1st image in thread at this point: would it be kept post war?)
And Lille was occupied by the Germans in BOTH world wars (it’s geography again). Despite that, the twentieth century created this marvellous Chambre de Commerce - complete with 76m belfray. (@yimbyalliance would approve?)
(As an aside the front of Lille Flandres - which was Lille’s only mainline station until Eurostar came along- used to be the front of Gare du Nord in Paris where.... Eurostar goes)
And to end where we began...this complex history at the cross-roads, this rich architecture of Bourbon & Habsburg, of the Flemish & the French is celebrated by this - a strip of glass & a strip of cement. Is this bathos or satire or a lack of awareness too profound for words?
An erratum: is Maison d’architecture not musee but think the irony profoundly stands !
