Around place de Catalogne

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Around place de Catalogne

Just south Montparnasse station, the circular place de Catalogne is filled with a giant, flat disc of a fountain designed by the Israeli artist Shaumaï Haber, and surrounded by Ricardo Bofill’s housing development, a gargantuan exercise in postmodern Classicism. To the northwest, place des 5 Martyrs du Lycée Buffon runs right through the buildings behind the Jardin Atlantique, offering a little-known view down the horse-chestnut-lined slope of boulevard Pasteur towards the Eifel Tower, apparently floating over the city below.

East of the place, you can thread your way through the backstreets to the tiny Impasse Lebouis, where the slender steel-and-glass front of the new Foundation Henri Cartier-Bresson (Tues – Sun 1 – 6.30pm, Wed 1 – 8.30pm, Sat 11am – 6.45pm, closed Aug; €5; ⓦwww.hericrtierbresson.org;M° Gaîté) is hidden away. The foundation houses the archive of the grand old photographer of Paris, who died shortly after its opening, in August 2004. There’s also a permanent photograph exhibition space. Fascinating, often intimate shows of the work of Cartier-Bresson and his contemporaries alternate with exhibitions promoting younger photographers, including the winner of the foundation’s annual prize.

South of place de Catalogne, Rue Vercingétorix runs between the two great wings of the Bofill complex – one oval, the other squared off – past the church of Notre-Dame du Travail, which was built at the end of the nineteenth century to cater for a congregation swollen by the men employed in the building the Eifel Tower and the surrounding exhibition palaces for the Exposition Univereselle. The stone came from the Cloth Pavilion and the slender metal columns of the interior – a fascinating industrial take on Gothic – from the Palace of Industry.