Paris Planning with Emily

The woman reflected in the mirror is Emily. My daughter (recently qualified in Architecture at University of Victoria) and I visited Paris recently. It's planning was a mystery to both of us - despite the combination of urban planning and architecture educations.

Is it an art or a science - urban planning - or is it rather more than that? This picture is one of the "rooms" exhibited at an interior design display held in Hotel de Ville in the centre of Paris. Each room contained items of furniture and decoration typical of various periods. It was such fun.

Which brings me to the bit of Paris we lived in and walked around for a while. It's the heart of the 13th arrondissement. A largely residential area, we were about 3kms as the crow flows to Notre Dame cathedral (Paris is so walkable) well served by public transport (bus, rail, metro). The intersection shown here is just down the street. You can see there are 7 access points - with Rue Bobillot forming 2 of them. At ground level the acute angle corners look to be about 30 degrees, but from this aerial, maybe only one of them is 30 degrees. The question this begs - and there are many - what is the rationale for the Paris street pattern? Rue Bobillot runs north from this point into Place d'Italie - another star like intersection - though much larger - with much more public space - and more intersecting streets. It has been an interesting investigation. The first place we went was The Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine (Architecture and Heritage City) which is a museum of architecture and monumental sculpture located in the Palais de Chaillot (Trocadéro), in Paris.

The museum occupies all of the space in the right hand curving section of the building shown in the picture. (Can you guess the vantage point from where the photograph was taken ... Eiffel Tower...).

While the museum is extraordinary for its displays of monumental masonry from Roman construction methods through to Gothic engineering, for architectural models, and in particular - as far as I was concerned - for its concentration on building  typologies for medium density construction, the exhibition is largely silent on the whys and wherefores of urban planning. For that we needed to visit the displays at The Pavillon de l'Arsenal which "...enables you to understand the evolution of Paris, the influence of its history on urbanism....".

This is part of the interior. The ground floor is a permanent exhibition on the history of the evolution of Paris and its planning. There are other exhibition areas - when we attended these were a history of Japanese architecture; and the results of design competitions for very large towers to be constructed in the heart of Paris. My focus was the chronological accounts that made up the wall displays you can see behind huge digital floor map (made up from Google Earth images). The rest of this posting contains my chronological selections from those displays....my emphasis and purpose is to capture what appears to be the key decision points that have shaped the city form, but which also embody ideas and values of equality and egalitarianism....

Really interesting to read about this. The city walls taken down, so long ago...

...and it is only now, from 1853 onward, that the legendary Haussmann enters the planning fray in this account of the Paris planning history...

...coincidentally, I noticed that the street name in the museum exhibit is very close to where we are staying, and I managed to find these buildings, and below display the google aerial of the site, and two images of the elevation shown in the museum plan...

Which brings me to the end of this account of the museum's account of the urban planning and development history of Paris. And I thought I'd leave you with this final image - from the design competition for towers in old Paris. (By the way - the new business or finance centre of Paris is away from the old city centre. That way the towers can be constructed without affecting the skylines and heritage cityscape that is currently an important objective of urban planning. That would have to change for this sort of vision to go ahead....)

Here's me reflecting. So - the questions posed right at the start of this posting - how did that set of street intersections happen near here - didn't really get answered. You can see that the layerings and patina you see here in Paris are not described by an easy analysis. Like life itself.