Description of the attraction
The famous Stravinsky Fountain is located between the avant-garde Center Pompidou and the Gothic Church of Saint-Merry. It is always full of mothers with delighted children, but the installation is capable of impressing an adult as well.
The visitor sees a huge (36 x 16.5 meters) low rectangular bowl filled with water. It contains sixteen strange figures. The black mechanisms, which combine gears and wheels with hoses, repeat intricate movements cycle after cycle. Huge bright figures sticking out of the water from time to time release streams of water. All this is fascinating and funny to watch.
The fountain was created in 1983 by the Swiss architect Jean Tinguely and his wife, the French artist Niki de Saint Phalle. The artists were invited to solve an unusual problem by Pierre Boulez, the founder of the Center for Musical Research, located just below Stravinsky Square. Boulez believed that this small square was boring and needed to be revitalized. By this time, an adherent of the "kinetic art" Tinguely had gained worldwide fame as the author of giant fantastic machines and self-destructive structures, and Boulez invited him to work on the appearance of the square. Tinguely set a condition: Niki de Saint Phalle should take part in the project.
The idea of the fountain encountered technical difficulties: taking into account the habitability of the space under the area, the weight of the structure had to be minimized. Tinguely, who usually worked with iron, this time used lightweight black painted aluminum for the mobile figures. Saint Phalle used weightless fiberglass and polyester for colored figures. The bowl of the fountain itself was made only 35 centimeters deep.
The fountain is dedicated to the great Russian composer, conductor and pianist Igor Stravinsky, who lived a significant part of his life in France. The relentless, enchanting slow movement of the mobile figures is inspired by music from Stravinsky's ballets The Rite of Spring and The Firebird. The composer wrote these ballets especially for Sergei Diaghilev's Russian Seasons, which played a huge role in the popularization of Russian culture.
