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
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.
Taking the Next Step: Paris Leads With Innovation in the Streets
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.
Auguste Perret’s Franciscan Chapel in Arcueil
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.
Villa Savoye
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 Bookshops
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.
The Cities We Leave to Future Generations
After a period of spurning our cities, we are again becoming an urban nation.
For years, investments in highways, malls, and residential developments were focused on the suburbs. The infrastructure of America’s great historical cities, so often mired in fiscal difficulty, was left to decay.
Today we are seeing a resurgence of the urban spirit. We have woken again to the social benefits of city life. We appreciate the exchange and innovation, the cultural vibrancy, and the economic and environmental benefits of compact living. Large-scale development projects are underway in the city centers and city governments are again spending on urban infrastructure.
The Newly Pedestrianized Banks of the Seine
A week ago, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë inaugurated the new Place de la République. Last Wednesday, he was on the banks of the river Seine, inaugurating another emblematic project of his municipal administration, the newly pedestrianized banks of the Seine.
The Unveiling of the New Place de la République
I described in a previous post how the place de la République has been a 150-year urban design headache. So when I visited the space on the day of its opening, after nearly two years of construction, what I wanted to know was if the urban design conundrum had finally been solved.
Stephane Kirkland at the American Library in Paris
I am very pleased to be speaking at the American Library in Paris on Tuesday, June 18th at 7:30 PM.
