WHY THE FRENCH LIKE MODERN DESIGN

Watching the French television political drama Marseille—and anything with Gérard Depardieu can’t be all bad—I was struck, again, by how much the French like modern design. The furniture in the scenes was inevitably modernist, more so than would be the case in Madame Secretary, say. Then it struck me that while the furniture was aggressively modern, most of the background architecture was not. The Marseille city hall, for example, is a beautiful nineteenth-century building, so is Depardieu’s villa (he plays the mayor, of course). In one episode, a hospital room filled with the latest medical gadgetry in a private clinic, is actually a paneled tall-ceilinged, fin-de-siècle salon. I guess you want something new when you have something old to put it in. Incidentally, the most noticeable modern buildings in Marseille are the faceless apartment slabs in the low-cost housing projects. They are cleaner and better maintained than their American counterparts, but otherwise, as the story makes clear, they are just as dehumanizing.