STREETWALLS OF PARIS
Paris? present look flows from centuries of layered development. Romans founded it as Lutetia, but little remains from those times. Medieval Paris persists as numerous churches, some secular monuments, and whole districts of ancient houses built on mazelike medieval street patterns: the Latin Quarter and the Marais. In the Renaissance, developer-kings instigated harmonious squares and residences of uniform design: Place des Vosges, Palais-Royal, Place Vendome, the Louvre.
Gustave Caillebotte
But what defines the character of Paris in most people?s minds came later. First the idea of grand axes migrated to Paris from Rome, then the architect of the Rue de Rivoli tacked a uniform wall to a long street. Finally, Haussmann combined the two ideas into today?s dominant impression of the City of Light. In the process, he helped create La Belle Epoque.
His boss, the proto-fascist Napoleon III, eventually found himself deposed-- but not until he had immersed all of Paris in his passionate hobby, which was rearranging Paris. Haussmann enthusiastically complied, scattering boulevards like angel dust, while evicting thousands of the disgruntled masses from their hovels, sometimes at gunpoint.
Gustave Caillebotte
The outcomes were: urban renewal on the most grandiose scale, and the Revolution of 1870. Now that the disgruntled masses are cold in their graves, the results look pretty good to us, unlike those of most urban renewal schemes. Could the ends in this case have justified the means?
* * *
Haussmann?s basic boulevard fa?ade consisted of five or six stories of streetwall and an additional story or two inside the mansard. Servants lived in the mansard because it was a long climb:
Assembled, these facades make continuous, harmonious streetscape out of a similarity (but not identicality!!) of parts; they?re particularly adept at defining axes because they meet the sky to make a fairly straight line. Haussmann linked up the major landmarks of Paris with shafts of space lined with variants of his trademark streetwall:
The much-loved boulevards are defined by more-or less continuous streetwalls of sufficient height to proportionately define their considerable breadth. Ground floor shops serve the residents above, though there?s also often a healthy sprinkling of offices on the upper levels:
At sidewalk level the buildings? upper reaches hardly matter; what?s important is that the street/corridor is intact with no unsightly and boring gaps. Such streets are livable, so people live in them:
The result is so picturesque that commercially-inclined oil-painters grind out renditions for the tourists to take home as reminders:
Major Impressionist painters started the trend when the buildings were still brand new.
Camille Pissarro
Claude Monet
Can you imagine painters vying to document the crap we throw up nowadays? For starters, it rarely generates coherent streetscape:
Proposal for SoMa, San Francisco
The man to thank for all this lovable order is Georges Eugene Haussmann (1809-91). Here?s Napoleon III doing just that:
Napoleon III (goatee, left) issues his mandate to Baron Haussmann (right).
Haussmann?s semi-standardized buildings gave leeway in detail but not much in massing. The mansard was an essential component; it tempered the sheer height of the streetwall, while it retreated from the edge to allow lots of sunshine:
These buildings, though tall, predate widespread use of the elevator. Hence units grew less pricey and desirable the higher you had to climb; the uppermost stories were deemed fit only for servants. In a curious reversal, these garrets are now often the most desirable units, as the buildings have almost all been retrofitted with lifts:
A mansarded modern building capitalizes on the elevator by selling views. The proportions aren?t quite right, for orthodox modernism doesn?t allow the tried and true:
Uppermost stories provide panoramic views of Paris? scenic roofscape:
The view from the Arc de Triomphe towards the skyscrapers of La Defense, which is like Houston or Charlotte, but entirely outside the city limits. Within the city limits Haussmann?s spirit pretty much continues to rule; and that spirit insists on a height limitation. This helps account for Paris? remarkably uniform population density. It hardly matters where you emerge from the Metro; you will find roughly the same condition. And that condition is Haussmann?s street wall:
The city line is marked by the solitary skyscraper (right) at the Porte Maillot. One or two modern buildings have abandoned the mansard rule; the Haussmann zoning must have been amended. The result can be a penthouse with terrace (right middleground). Square ?arch? in distance is meant to echo Arc de Triomphe at a more colossal scale; its legs are office buildings, and a couple of observation floors span between them, while the slender, off-center tensegrity shaft encloses glass elevators loaded with tourists. These wobble as they ascend (French engineering specializes in stretching the envelope: it brought you the Concorde, the Eiffel Tower, the Millau Viaduct, the Citroen, and this).
As time went by, the Epoque got more and more Belle as the Arts grew more Beaux. A sedate fa?ade from the time of Haussmann:
By contrast, Belle Epoque exuberance:
On the avenues, most buildings are built of a limestone that reflects what the weather is up to: grey in the rain, a warm, glowing buff in the sun, and burnished gold when the sun comes out just after a thunderstorm. Occasionally, a polychrome oddball crashes the scene. Think of it as welcome relief:
Lots to look at, but fortunately no great ideas:
In Paris great ideas are reserved for the monuments?from which we should demand great ideas:
Ordinary architecture runs in familiar and reassuring patterns, but it?s mostly neither dull nor ugly:
?A louer bureaux?: Offices for rent. There are probably apartments too; these buildings often aren?t zoned by function.
The train of historical-inevitability-in-hindsight hurtles toward Art Nouveau, gushing curves:
Art Nouveau meets medieval Chateauesque: both Richardson and Sullivan appear to be influences here.
Can this architect have been looking at Frank Furness? Gives a whole new meaning to the word ?eclectic.? Still interesting to look at, still no great ideas.
Beaux-Arts tending toward Art Nouveau, and a great idea striving to be born: the slender iron curtain wall. (Looks like the rooftop addition is fairly recent):
And finally the train pulls into the station with Hector Guimard, Art Nouveau genius par excellence (best known for his Metro entrances):
Castel Beranger
An amazing building:
Dragons or plant debris?
New meaning for the term ?organic.?
Full of great ideas:
The age of genius architecture upon us:
.
More Art Nouveau, though not by a genius:
How many geniuses are there anyway? Enough to populate the architectural profession?
Later the train pulled into a station marked ?Deco? (or did it say ?Mussolini??):
Things didn?t get boring on the boulevards until modern times, when the ordinary architects were robbed of their rich vocabulary by the theory of modernism. Now they could speak only in grunts:
Mansard abandoned, lifeless ground floor, not much to engage the eye, totalitarian monotony, footprint too big (does anyone buy the architect?s pretense that this is two buildings?).
Boring and insipidly full of the constructivist sculptural clich?s of orthodox modernism: the cantilevered corner, Aalto-esque tapered columns, vain repetitions of machine order, use of utilitarian objects as decorative elements (concrete mullions!!), the mandatory translation of traditional forms into approved vocabulary elements (thus dark mansard roof becomes bronze-tone curtain wall!). Aaaargh.
When the mirror-glass box arrives on the scene, things go seriously wrong:
This building?s exactly the height of its neighbors, but it drastically disrupts the scale of this street. Here you can see that being out of scale is not for one tiny microsecond a question of height. It?s instead a function of too big a footprint and too little articulation of surface; there isn?t enough detail to break down the utterly banal gigantism of the overall form and the undifferentiated surfaces. Why doesn?t zoning address itself to these two very genuine issues instead of obsessing about building height, which is usually a red herring?
This building?s form would be ok at about the size of a toaster. The Art Nouveau building just beyond may be overdone but it offers reproof; maybe the sheer glass banality of the new building?s a reaction to all that sculpted cream. Skyscraper at end of street: Maine-Montparnasse Tower, one of two unclustered skyscrapers inside the city limits. It looks ok compositionally at the end of this street, but it ruins countless views in this city. Well, it?s ironic that this street is ruined anyway?and by its little brother! It?s the skyscraper that?s not out of scale.
Scene much improved:
Hong Kong comes to Paris. The balconies are for displaying your junk:
In the blunt-pencil school, neither the buildings nor their architects are sharp. Just regardes-moi those flaccid polygonal bays with their upper story?what is it--balconies:
Meeting Haussmann part way, Post-Modernism (right middleground) makes a (not very) valiant effort to emulate the mansard, but the building?s thin and brittle like a saltine, and the footprint?s way too big. This one?s a galumphing rhino:
In the sad Les Halles redevelopment, newish mansarded superblocks pretend they?ve been there for a century and change. No one?s convinced; a century ago nobody in Paris would have put a single apartment building on a whole block. Too bad (post-)modernist budgets don?t allow the kind of exuberant articulation of the wall that characterized the beaux-arts examples?not that today?s architect would likely know how to ornament his building, even if he had the budget. Still, I guess it could be worse; at least it?s fairly polite:
A better-than-average postmodernist?s take on his Art Nouveau-ish neighbors. Not too bad and definitely contextual:
Can you guess which is the brand new building? Look at the shoe size:
And don?t forget the machine order.
* * *
Paris? present look flows from centuries of layered development. Romans founded it as Lutetia, but little remains from those times. Medieval Paris persists as numerous churches, some secular monuments, and whole districts of ancient houses built on mazelike medieval street patterns: the Latin Quarter and the Marais. In the Renaissance, developer-kings instigated harmonious squares and residences of uniform design: Place des Vosges, Palais-Royal, Place Vendome, the Louvre.
Gustave Caillebotte
But what defines the character of Paris in most people?s minds came later. First the idea of grand axes migrated to Paris from Rome, then the architect of the Rue de Rivoli tacked a uniform wall to a long street. Finally, Haussmann combined the two ideas into today?s dominant impression of the City of Light. In the process, he helped create La Belle Epoque.
His boss, the proto-fascist Napoleon III, eventually found himself deposed-- but not until he had immersed all of Paris in his passionate hobby, which was rearranging Paris. Haussmann enthusiastically complied, scattering boulevards like angel dust, while evicting thousands of the disgruntled masses from their hovels, sometimes at gunpoint.
Gustave Caillebotte
The outcomes were: urban renewal on the most grandiose scale, and the Revolution of 1870. Now that the disgruntled masses are cold in their graves, the results look pretty good to us, unlike those of most urban renewal schemes. Could the ends in this case have justified the means?
* * *
Haussmann?s basic boulevard fa?ade consisted of five or six stories of streetwall and an additional story or two inside the mansard. Servants lived in the mansard because it was a long climb:
Assembled, these facades make continuous, harmonious streetscape out of a similarity (but not identicality!!) of parts; they?re particularly adept at defining axes because they meet the sky to make a fairly straight line. Haussmann linked up the major landmarks of Paris with shafts of space lined with variants of his trademark streetwall:
The much-loved boulevards are defined by more-or less continuous streetwalls of sufficient height to proportionately define their considerable breadth. Ground floor shops serve the residents above, though there?s also often a healthy sprinkling of offices on the upper levels:
At sidewalk level the buildings? upper reaches hardly matter; what?s important is that the street/corridor is intact with no unsightly and boring gaps. Such streets are livable, so people live in them:
The result is so picturesque that commercially-inclined oil-painters grind out renditions for the tourists to take home as reminders:
Major Impressionist painters started the trend when the buildings were still brand new.
Camille Pissarro
Claude Monet
Can you imagine painters vying to document the crap we throw up nowadays? For starters, it rarely generates coherent streetscape:
Proposal for SoMa, San Francisco
The man to thank for all this lovable order is Georges Eugene Haussmann (1809-91). Here?s Napoleon III doing just that:
Napoleon III (goatee, left) issues his mandate to Baron Haussmann (right).
Haussmann?s semi-standardized buildings gave leeway in detail but not much in massing. The mansard was an essential component; it tempered the sheer height of the streetwall, while it retreated from the edge to allow lots of sunshine:
These buildings, though tall, predate widespread use of the elevator. Hence units grew less pricey and desirable the higher you had to climb; the uppermost stories were deemed fit only for servants. In a curious reversal, these garrets are now often the most desirable units, as the buildings have almost all been retrofitted with lifts:
A mansarded modern building capitalizes on the elevator by selling views. The proportions aren?t quite right, for orthodox modernism doesn?t allow the tried and true:
Uppermost stories provide panoramic views of Paris? scenic roofscape:
The view from the Arc de Triomphe towards the skyscrapers of La Defense, which is like Houston or Charlotte, but entirely outside the city limits. Within the city limits Haussmann?s spirit pretty much continues to rule; and that spirit insists on a height limitation. This helps account for Paris? remarkably uniform population density. It hardly matters where you emerge from the Metro; you will find roughly the same condition. And that condition is Haussmann?s street wall:
The city line is marked by the solitary skyscraper (right) at the Porte Maillot. One or two modern buildings have abandoned the mansard rule; the Haussmann zoning must have been amended. The result can be a penthouse with terrace (right middleground). Square ?arch? in distance is meant to echo Arc de Triomphe at a more colossal scale; its legs are office buildings, and a couple of observation floors span between them, while the slender, off-center tensegrity shaft encloses glass elevators loaded with tourists. These wobble as they ascend (French engineering specializes in stretching the envelope: it brought you the Concorde, the Eiffel Tower, the Millau Viaduct, the Citroen, and this).
As time went by, the Epoque got more and more Belle as the Arts grew more Beaux. A sedate fa?ade from the time of Haussmann:
By contrast, Belle Epoque exuberance:
On the avenues, most buildings are built of a limestone that reflects what the weather is up to: grey in the rain, a warm, glowing buff in the sun, and burnished gold when the sun comes out just after a thunderstorm. Occasionally, a polychrome oddball crashes the scene. Think of it as welcome relief:
Lots to look at, but fortunately no great ideas:
In Paris great ideas are reserved for the monuments?from which we should demand great ideas:
Ordinary architecture runs in familiar and reassuring patterns, but it?s mostly neither dull nor ugly:
?A louer bureaux?: Offices for rent. There are probably apartments too; these buildings often aren?t zoned by function.
The train of historical-inevitability-in-hindsight hurtles toward Art Nouveau, gushing curves:
Art Nouveau meets medieval Chateauesque: both Richardson and Sullivan appear to be influences here.
Can this architect have been looking at Frank Furness? Gives a whole new meaning to the word ?eclectic.? Still interesting to look at, still no great ideas.
Beaux-Arts tending toward Art Nouveau, and a great idea striving to be born: the slender iron curtain wall. (Looks like the rooftop addition is fairly recent):
And finally the train pulls into the station with Hector Guimard, Art Nouveau genius par excellence (best known for his Metro entrances):
Castel Beranger
An amazing building:
Dragons or plant debris?
New meaning for the term ?organic.?
Full of great ideas:
The age of genius architecture upon us:
More Art Nouveau, though not by a genius:
How many geniuses are there anyway? Enough to populate the architectural profession?
Later the train pulled into a station marked ?Deco? (or did it say ?Mussolini??):
Things didn?t get boring on the boulevards until modern times, when the ordinary architects were robbed of their rich vocabulary by the theory of modernism. Now they could speak only in grunts:
Mansard abandoned, lifeless ground floor, not much to engage the eye, totalitarian monotony, footprint too big (does anyone buy the architect?s pretense that this is two buildings?).
Boring and insipidly full of the constructivist sculptural clich?s of orthodox modernism: the cantilevered corner, Aalto-esque tapered columns, vain repetitions of machine order, use of utilitarian objects as decorative elements (concrete mullions!!), the mandatory translation of traditional forms into approved vocabulary elements (thus dark mansard roof becomes bronze-tone curtain wall!). Aaaargh.
When the mirror-glass box arrives on the scene, things go seriously wrong:
This building?s exactly the height of its neighbors, but it drastically disrupts the scale of this street. Here you can see that being out of scale is not for one tiny microsecond a question of height. It?s instead a function of too big a footprint and too little articulation of surface; there isn?t enough detail to break down the utterly banal gigantism of the overall form and the undifferentiated surfaces. Why doesn?t zoning address itself to these two very genuine issues instead of obsessing about building height, which is usually a red herring?
This building?s form would be ok at about the size of a toaster. The Art Nouveau building just beyond may be overdone but it offers reproof; maybe the sheer glass banality of the new building?s a reaction to all that sculpted cream. Skyscraper at end of street: Maine-Montparnasse Tower, one of two unclustered skyscrapers inside the city limits. It looks ok compositionally at the end of this street, but it ruins countless views in this city. Well, it?s ironic that this street is ruined anyway?and by its little brother! It?s the skyscraper that?s not out of scale.
Scene much improved:
Hong Kong comes to Paris. The balconies are for displaying your junk:
In the blunt-pencil school, neither the buildings nor their architects are sharp. Just regardes-moi those flaccid polygonal bays with their upper story?what is it--balconies:
Meeting Haussmann part way, Post-Modernism (right middleground) makes a (not very) valiant effort to emulate the mansard, but the building?s thin and brittle like a saltine, and the footprint?s way too big. This one?s a galumphing rhino:
In the sad Les Halles redevelopment, newish mansarded superblocks pretend they?ve been there for a century and change. No one?s convinced; a century ago nobody in Paris would have put a single apartment building on a whole block. Too bad (post-)modernist budgets don?t allow the kind of exuberant articulation of the wall that characterized the beaux-arts examples?not that today?s architect would likely know how to ornament his building, even if he had the budget. Still, I guess it could be worse; at least it?s fairly polite:
A better-than-average postmodernist?s take on his Art Nouveau-ish neighbors. Not too bad and definitely contextual:
Can you guess which is the brand new building? Look at the shoe size:
And don?t forget the machine order.
* * *
)
