Mechanical Nantes – The Director’s Cut…

It’s Monday and I slept longer than planned. Nantes is an hour ahead of Dublin time.

I pass on the Nespresso machine in my room and take the elevator downstairs to the breakfast room. The Sozo puts out a nice spread. The yogurt is tart, the French toast seems to be stuffed with almond paste, and the melon was very sweet. They offered to make eggs but I told them I eat continental when I am in France : )

Today’s reservation is for the gallery at Les Machines. The hotel concierge directs me to the tram, which will be my mode of transportation for the week. I buy a 24 hour ticket at the machine and hop aboard, making notes of stops along the way that I want to come back to later in the week.

The Ile de Nantes district was an industrial area that is being rehabilitated into an art-focused urban space. Les Machines is in the old naval shipyard, which had most recently been utilized as a flea market. One of the DVDs I brought home showed them demolishing the cinder block walls that compartmentalized the space, and turning the shell into a beautiful steel and glass thoroughfare that now houses the factory, the gallery, and the larger-than-life elephant that I will ride tomorrow.

I’m an hour early so I pop over to the factory but I don’t see a lot going on there. I look around for information outside the gallery, but my QR code reader is not working and I cannot get my translator app to work either, so I won’t understand what the guide is saying. Why am I constantly plagued with technical issues : (

When it’s time to enter the gallery, I’m mildly disappointed at not being able to ride any of the animals even though I see others who have been given that opportunity. But it’s a really fascinating place. I would learn a few days from now that Les Machines is a three-part project covering nearly two decades of planning and funding. The Grand Elephant was the first piece of the plan, the Carousel was the second, and the third, currently in progress, is the Grand Heron Tree. The mechanical elements are built in the factory on the right side of the complex, and displayed in the Gallery on the left before moving to their permanent home in either the Carrousel or the Heron Tree.

There are birds. Hummingbirds with a three foot wing span who move towards a metal blossom from which to feed. A pair of birds who do something like a mating dance while the technician sings a concerto:

There is a chameleon that crawls along a steel track and grabs a big steel bug with its big steel tongue:

There is an articulated sloth with long steel nails that very slowly crawled along a steel pole. The schematic for this animal, as with several others, is posted on the wall near the feature:

There is the heron, operated by two technicians and carrying a passenger in each basket as it flies over our heads the length of the gallery. I have posted an all-too-short video of this heron in flight on YouTube. A second heron is currently in the factory.

There are bugs. A bee that carried three people on its back as it crept in. A spider that came down from the ceiling with four passengers, and snorted smoke. I understand will function as one of the elevators in the Heron Tree:

There is a greenhouse with its collection of Venus flytraps both organic and mechanical, living orchids in test tubes and terrariums in specimen jars. There’s also a model and a schematic of the Heron Tree:

I was surprised to find the Carrousel des Mondes Marins open. It is 25 meters high, 20 meters in diameter, and has three levels filled with mechanical sea creatures and other deep ocean devices. You can watch as long as you want, and your ticket allows you one ride on any creature or device of your choosing.

The top level has the most active rides, with seahorses that breathe steam, and boats that rock. My favorite was the conch shell which was static, but which had a flock of metal flying fish above it, whose metal wings went “clackety clackety” as the carousel made its circuit.

The bottom level (The Abyss) has mostly static creatures although a couple of them ‘submerged’ into even lower depths. You could also ride in the cage which went up and down the center pole. The creatures here were accessible via a staircase.

Creatures on the second level were accessible via mechanized gang planks. I rode a sublime crayfish (the last photo in this set) so I could look down into the ‘bottom of the sea.” Riders are encouraged to pull all the levers which operate tails, fins, eyes, smoke… it’s a gadget toy store. I also really enjoyed the hinged coral fans that waved on the walls in this area.

I came back the next day to ride The Grand Elephant. It is three times the size of a live elephant and might be compared in size to a mammoth. The body is made from planks of tulip tree wood, which is not fibrous and has no knots, and is very lightweight. It took the skins of 5 cows to make each of the elephant’s ears. It took 150 people 30 months to build. It vocalizes like a real elephant and sprays water from its trunk on unsuspecting passersby. It is driven by a large engine in the back and guided by a navigator in a glass cage under the elephant’s chest. These are the shots I took yesterday while it was in its ‘garage’ between the Les Machines factory and gallery:

I took these shots when I boarded today at the Carrousel, and also filmed its arrival which you can see on my YouTube channel.

Finally, it’s my turn to ride. I walk the gang plank into the belly of the beast and follow several other riders up the spiral staircase to the very top, under the canvas shade.

I had thought the best place to ride would be on top of the elephant’s back, but the more interesting ride was actually on one of the side platforms, where you could watch the mechanical beast at work. The elephant wiggles its ears and bats its eyelashes as it plods across the parking lot between the Carrousel and the Les Machines factory – a journey that takes about 30 minutes. See what it is like to ride the Grand Elephant on my YouTube channel

There’s a lot of detail along the sides:

As we return to the Les Machines factory, I see the head of a heron peeking up over a fence. There are signs on the fence showing what it will look like when it is finished.

The Heron Tree is the third project that Les Machines is working on. There is a 1/10th model in front of the gift shop that you can walk on. The actual tree will be made of steel with plants rooted in the piping, and will measure 55 meters in diameter by 35 meters tall and is expected to weigh as much as a cargo ship. The branches will extend over the bike path that runs along the Loire River and will offer 1600 meters of walkable elevated gardens. There will be platforms in the top of the tree that will allow people to board the pair of herons that will fly an additional 15 meters above the tree. There are also plans to install hummingbirds on poles throughout the city. Estimated completion date is 2027.

What a great reason to come back…