Architecture
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Architecture in Paris - the shock of the new.
Viewed from the top of the Eiffel Tower, Paris looks astonishingly uniform. Squint, or go on a rainy day, and those endless lead roofs could almost be a choppy sea, its silver-grey surface broken only by the arrow-straight boulevards - urban canyons that fill with green leaves in spring and cold winds in winter. Rising from this sea, however, are the great hulls and masts of Paris's monuments. Some - Notre-Dame, the Lourve, the Pantheon - are so familiar its hard to imagine they were ever new. Others are as shocking today as when they were first built.
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Haussmann's brave new Paris
The sheer harmoniousness of modern Paris is the legacy of a uniquely energetic age. From 1853, the overgrown and insanitary medieval capital was ruthlessly transformed into an urban utopia. In half a century, half of Paris was rebuilt. Napoleon Ill’s authoritarian government provided the force – land was compulsorily purchased and boulevards and bulldozed through old quarters – while banks and private speculators provided the cash. The poor, meanwhile, either provided the labour or were cleared out to the suburban badlands.
The presiding genius was the emperor’s chief of works, Baron Haussmann. In his brave new city, every apartment building was seven stories high. Every facade was built in golden limestone, often quarried from under the city itself, with unobtrusive Neoclassical details sculpted around the windows. Every second and fifth floor had its wrought-iron balcony and every lead roof sloped back from the streetfront at precisely 45 degrees. It would all have been inhumanly regular if it hadn’t been for the ground-floor shops, which have provided Paris’s streets with a more varied face ever since.
Eiffel's modern world
Some extravagant new buildings were erected in and after the Haussmann era, notably the magnificent Opera Garnier and the blanched bulbosity of the Sacre-Coeur, atop Montmartre. But the era of the outrageous, epoch-defining structure really began in 1889, when Eiffel’s ironwork rocket landed on the Left Bank. With a loud bang of hammer on rivet, the industrial world had arrived. Parisians were outraged. Artists and writers protested against the "gigantic black factory chimney" which would see "all our monuments humiliated, all our architecture belittled". But the new Eiffel Tower anchored its feet foursquare in the Champ de Mars and resisted all its critics.
In 1990, the giant glass aviaries of the Grand Palais and Petit Palais pointed the way towards a more feminine modernity, as did a less visible but more pervasive symbol of the new era, the metro, whose sinuous signage helped launch Art Nouveau on the rest of Europe.
Filling holes in the 1970s
Parisians had most of the new century to get used to their new city – thankfully, the Nazi plan to reduce Paris to rubble was thwarted. The unrest of 1968, however, brought more than just political change: within a few years, a glass tower scraped the skies of Montparnasse, and the stately ironwork halls that had long sheltered Paris’s central marketplace, Les Halles, had been demolished. "The belly of Paris", as Zola had called the market, stood empty for a decade, and only in 1979 did the Forum des Halles fill the gap, its curving glass arcades pouring down into a giant pit of a shopping centre and transport interchange. Far more successful was its closed neighbour and contemporary, Renzo Plano and Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre. Wearing its insides on its outside, it presented a postmodern face of blue and green pipes that vied for room with red lifts and grey steel cabling. Critics called it a giant petrol refinery. Parisians, with a mixture of irony and fondness, adopted the name of an adjacent street and dubbed it Beaubourg – or "Prettytown".
Presidential passions: the "Big Projects
Ambitious as they were, the schemes of the 1970s were just warm-up acts for the Grands Projects of Socialist president François Miterrand. Between 1981 and 1995, Paris spawned a whole clutch of new cultural centres, including a radical geometric structure in the very middle of the Louvre’s courtyard. With I.M. Pei’s glass Pyramide, some muttered that Mitterrand was trying to outdo the Pharoahs.
Cynics compared the Grands Projects to the medieval frenzy for cathedral construction, with culture as the new state religion and the taxpayer footing the 35 billion-franc bill. Some buildings have worn better than others. The Institut du Monde Arabe has become a well-loved classic, while the Cite de la Musique attracts concert-goers and architectural plaudits alike, and the Pyramide has become a symbol of Paris as potent as the Louvre itself. The Bibliotheque Nationale, however, has been beset by technical problems, while the Grande Arche de la Defense feels emptily overweening rather than triumphal. As for the unhappy Bastille Opera, it has been compared to a hospital, an elephant and according to Parisian writer Edmund White, "a cow palace in Fort Worth".
Landmarks of the future
Vanity-fuelled cultural legacies aren’t the exclusive province of the Left. Outgoing president Jacques Chirac bequeaths the splendid Musee du Quia Branly, a signature work by the darling of contemporary French architecture, Jean Nouvel. Its radical lines are offset by a certain grace and modesty – qualities unlikely t appear in the latest addition to Paris’s architectural roster, Frank Gehry’s Fondation Louis Vuitton poor la Creation, supposed to be finished by 2010. It will stand in the Bois de Boulogne’s Jardin d’Acclimation and, judging by the plans, will bear more than a passing resemblance to a lunatic glass armadillo which has burst out of its own skin.
A different kind of architectural ambition will soon take shape as the Tour Phare, a boldy curvaceous eco-scraper in the Défense business district that, by 2012, will rival the height of the Eiffel Tower. Far more significant, if less self-promoting, will be the new, made-over Les Halles. The old, murky underground halls are soon to be transformed by architect David Mangin into light-filled spaces under a giant glass roof.
