July 2007
(after 6 years)
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| To begin where we began: on a rainy day which didn't feel like late June, Rob picked us up at Gare du Nord, and then found legal parking under the Louvre. I didn't know there was a second mirror-image Pei pyramid underground. (Inevitably there's a shopping mall too. At least it's a stylish one.) |
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| Then out into the Jardin des Tuileries, and the sun made its entry. There was of course a stall renting out the colourful vintage boats. |
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| There's a stylish new double-decker pedestrian bridge linking the Tuileries to Orsay, very nicely done. (Perhaps it was there last time? I see it was recently renamed for president Senghor, of Senegal, instead of the battle of Solferino, of Napoleon III.) |
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The bits Haussmann didn't touch. I was surpsised and pleased to find again the two oldest houses in Paris. (11 & 13 Rue François Miron, 1327.) And enjoyed the Place des Vosges as much as the first time. In 1605 even the king couldn't make a sqaure perfectly square, life crept in. |
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| Control over nature has grown a little since then. This is La Défense, the office district west of the centre. The roaring expressways planned in the 1950s were thankfully later covered over with a huge pedestrian deck, leaving the cars somewhere down there with the trains and the water-pipes. |
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| More of La Défense. (We had a glass engineer among us, you see.) All three at the Grand Arche, at the highest point of the famous axis of the Champs-Élysées. There's a nice museum with all the models of other ideas put forward in many rounds of competition, most of them awful. |
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| Older glass: the Grand Palais, built for the 1900 exhibition. In order for his 2x3m paintings not to be overwhelmed by the space, the artist (Anselm Kiefer) built these big boxes for them. (Plus some funny fallen-down towers, at far left.) |
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| I spent a day walking the boulevards, most of the way from the old national library (Richelieu) at the top left of the map to the new one (Mitterand, or simply Trés Grande Bibliothèque) at the bottom right, as I'd never seen either. The TGB has another new loopy-double-decker bridge to the imaginative Parc de Bercy across the river. |
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| At the end of Gallerie Pierce's street, a building in a creative cocoon. This is near Etoile, very Haussmann. I'd never realised how many layers there are to these buildings, much fewer than half of the windows face the street. (As you can see from space.) |
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| Part of the museaum Chirac hopes to be remembered by, opened as the Musée du quai Branly last year. It collects, objets des civilisations d'Afrique, d'Asie, d'Océanie et des Amériques, as they say. A scary place, full of demons incarnate. And videos to make sure you understand they weren't just meant to be admired behind glass. |
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| Fourqueux. |
This came after England. It is something of a miracle, by the way, that I've got these onto the web in only 2 months. My slides from 2000 and 2001 are still sitting mostly unsorted and unscanned, there were just too many of them. |
