On January 29th, 2014, a conference was held in Paris to present and discuss the new wave of work commissioned by AIGP, the organization created to ensure the ongoing contribution of the interdisciplinary experts initially solicited through the Grand Paris consultation (Le Grand Paris – Part 1: The Launch)
Eight months after the opening of the new Place de la République, I sat down with Pierre-Alain Trévelo, one of the two partners of TVK, the up-and-coming Paris-based firm responsible for the square’s design, for an inside take on the insights and learnings from this emblematic project.
Auguste Perret was a founding father of modern architecture in Europe. An exhibition at the Palais d’Iéna, one of Perret’s own buildings, presents eight of his masterpieces in a highly didactic and well-presented exhibition.
I was honored to have the opportunity to speak last week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC.
In connection with the wonderful exhibition Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris, I was invited to a join an impressive selection of scholars to take part in a day-long symposium, Old Topographics: Photography and Urbanization in Nineteenth Century Paris. I chose to speak on the Place Saint-Michel as an example of Second Empire Parisian urbanism.
During a trip to Beijing last week, Stephane Kirkland met with the publisher of the Simplified Chinese edition of Paris Reborn, to be released in the first quarter of 2014.
Simon-Auguste was a twentieth-century French painter who secured a position in the art world, in utter lack of deference to the trends of the post-war period, thanks to a sure graphic sense and a restrained, intimate sensibility.
This week I have written a guest post for the Project for Public Spaces’ blog. PPS sees the proactive approach Paris is taking with its public spaces as “fundamental to the future of cities.” Read the piece on the the PPS web site.
With this year’s Heritage Days fast upon us, here is a post on one of the buildings I visited during last year’s event: the Franciscan chapel in Arcueil designed by Auguste Perret.
Hidden away and, in all appearance, a humble structure, this is a building that reveals itself on closer examination to be a marvel of simplicity and elegant logic, a true architectural lesson.
A beautiful August day was the chance for a visit to the Villa Savoye, to which I hadn’t been in years. A few weeks after my visit of the Le Corbusier show at MOMA, it was a real pleasure to connect with Corbu’s work in flesh and blood, as it were.
Paris’s identity is deeply rooted in the fact that it is a literary city. Since the days of Villon and Du Beslay, the art of the word has had a special place in this city.
The craft of writing benefits from a special aura here, a spirit that has fostered the development of generations of French talent and attracted wave after wave of foreigners.
This in turn has led the city to be particularly frequently and fondly treated in the world of letters, which has helped to forge the extraordinarily unique and powerful collective unconscious of what Paris represents, to further the myth of this Parnassus on the Seine.