The Town Hall, Tours

Description

The heritage of the city of Tours

Famous first because it formed the center of the arts in the Renaissance, the city of Tours, however, must most of its public buildings in the nineteenth century: the courthouse, theater, train station and Town Hall were all built or rebuilt between 1840 and 1900.

Laloux in Tours

The most spectacular of these buildings is undoubtedly the Town Hall, municipal grand palace built by architect Victor Laloux between 1897 and 1903. Laloux, best known for being the architect of the Gare d´Orsay in Paris, its accumulation in building references to the French architectural tradition, reminiscent of the deep roots of the city in its history. But the grandiose aesthetic of the architect, his taste for changes of scale and enlarged ornaments, also served to give the new Town Hall a unique place in its urban context.

The interior, an artist´s work

The interior was the work of a team of sculptors and painters, all confirmed artists and specialists of large sets official. There are also no surprise that many artists had occurred a few years ago on the vast field of decorative Town Hall of Paris.

Tours, provincial capital

And had to be done in 6 years this building designed to the scale of a provincial capital, and whose message, conveyed by a talkative decor, is both that of a republic triumphant, proud and sure of its values, and that of a city of the Indre-et-Loire prosperous, dynamic, with “”local celebrities”” are all called to a pompous celebration.