Globe: Paris skyline may be open to development

[ganjavih]

I agree with the general idea unimaginitive is trying to convey. Toronto has a few significant historic buildings scattered around the city, unfortunately, it lacks an "old city". I also would be willing to trade a significant building for an intact street or neighbourhood, even if the individual building may be not particularly remarkable.

Wouldn't it be great to have the old King West back?

 

[Hydrogen]

It's almost too hard to imagine that anything like that was actually there once.

 

[wyliepoon]

New York Times

Link to article

New French Museum Embraces Architecture



By ELAINE SCIOLINO
Published: September 18, 2007

PARIS, Sept. 17 — President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who is increasingly faulted, even by his own government, for usurping the responsibilities of his top ministers, stepped into the role of culture minister on Monday.

At a low-key ceremony he inaugurated La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, (the City of Architecture and Heritage) in Paris, which reopened after a $114 million, decade-long makeover.

“I commit myself fully to this mission, to give back the possibility of boldness to architecture,†he said in his speech.

Mr. Sarkozy turned the occasion into a promotion of French architecture throughout the ages, inviting some of the world’s top architects to the museum (and to lunch at the Élysée Palace) and winning their endorsements along the way.

President François Mitterrand built the glass pyramid at the Louvre, the Grande Arche de la Défense, the Bastille Opera and the François Mitterrand French National Library; Jacques Chirac created a museum devoted to African, Asian, Oceanic and pre-Columbian art at Quai Branly beside the Eiffel Tower.

But unlike his recent predecessors, who adopted grand architectural projects as their contribution to French culture, Mr. Sarkozy has expressed a determination to make culture more accessible to the masses. Last month he sent a letter to his culture minister, Christine Albanel, with a plan to “democratize†culture, including a proposal to allow free access to major museums and to put more “creative and bold†cultural programs on television. But in a country gripped by uncertainty about its national identity, he also is aware of the importance of culture in projecting an image of the grandeur of France. In that vein Mr. Sarkozy called the new museum the embodiment of “our entire country, the territory of our values, our references, our hopes,†adding that it was “the place of our identity.â€

The new French president was surrounded by 14 prizewinning architects, including the Briton Norman Foster, who designed the Reichstag dome in Berlin and the viaduct at Millau in France; Richard Rogers, one of the builders of the Pompidou Center in Paris; and the Iraqi-British avant-garde architect Zaha Hadid.

The architects did not disappoint their host. Speaking in the Élysée courtyard after lunch with the president, Mr. Foster called Mr. Sarkozy’s approach to culture “fantastic,†and “very refreshing,†adding, “I thought there was a great enthusiasm, a sense of passion, of conviction, a belief in the importance of architecture, the way that it’s a litmus test, if you like, a barometer for the values of a nation.â€

With three galleries and 86,000 square feet of space, the City of Architecture and Heritage bills itself as the largest architectural museum in the world. It is housed in the east wing of the Palais de Chaillot, at the Place du Trocadéro on a hill overlooking the curve of the Seine, with gorgeous views of Paris, including a straight-on view of the Eiffel Tower just across the river.

The museum is a shrine to 12 centuries of France’s architecture — with exhibitions that range from the reproduction of a stained-glass window in the gothic cathedral at Chartres to a walk-in replica of an apartment in Le Corbusier’s mid-20th century Cité Radieuse in Marseille. It includes a soaring, glass-roofed main gallery housing 350 plaster-cast reproductions of the most important examples of medieval, Gothic and Renaissance church architecture: cathedral facades, gargoyles, pillars, statues, crypts.

In another gallery paintings and frescoes from the 12th to 16th centuries have been faithfully reproduced. A third gallery is devoted to modern architecture, with maquettes from the mid-19th through the 21st centuries, including one of Renzo Piano’s 1998 cultural center in the French territory of New Caledonia in the South Pacific.

To both woo and educate the public, the museum has installed interactive multimedia presentations (even the small cafe has interactive computer screens) and an architecture library that eventually will hold 45,000 volumes, the largest such collection in Europe. Children can build their own structures with Legos and other building materials. The goal is to attract half a million visitors a year.

Critics have noted that visitors may not find plaster copies of great French churches and cathedrals particularly appealing, especially in a country so richly endowed with the real thing. But Jean Nouvel, the architect of the Quai Branly museum, called the new museum amazing and noted that “it was very important to unite— in one place — the history of the past with the one that’s unfolding today.â€

 

[Minato ku]

Sorry to revive this old thread by this is what I dream for Montparnasse.
A little drawing made by myself.

The best way to integrate Montparnasse tower is to build new skyscrapers around (many people agree with idea including big architects like Jean Nouvel).
It is also a good way to give a new birth at the district of Montparnasse by adding new activities and destroying the ugly old bockhaus mall.

The idea (and I am not the only to have this on) is to tranform Montparnasse in a Parisian Times Square.

 

[Tewder]

I agree with the general idea unimaginitive is trying to convey. Toronto has a few significant historic buildings scattered around the city, unfortunately, it lacks an "old city".

Perhaps.... but the St. Lawrence neighbourhood does have enough of a critical mass of 'historic' buildings to feel like an 'old town' with the cathedral, the market, St. Lawrence Hall, the Flat Iron, the facades on the south side of Front Street etc. Also, there are a number of other areas in the city that do preserve a significantly historic character like Cabbage Town, the Annex and the Distillery/Corktown etc.

Nevertheless I do completely agree with you that we are hardly at risk of feeling 'preserved' in Toronto and that we should do better at appreciating and highlighting the layers of history that remain. The plans for Fort York are exciting and will leave the city with what will essentially emerge as a new major historic site and tourist attraction. The Parliament site is another location with potential, particularly if a museum of Toronto is included.

 

[Urban Shocker]

Talking of the layers of history that remain, our heritage of suburban Modernist single family homes from the immediate post-WW2 years - an 'Old Town' in the making if ever there was one - is being degraded daily by architectural reactionaries armed with large sheets of styrofoam board and stucco-spraying equipment. But in the downtown east side, I'm delighted with the eclectic architectural layering that has taken place since the '70s: from the red-brick-with-contrasting-trim contextualism of the '70s and '80s to today's glass and steel buildings it is holding together nicely as a reinvented neighbourhood. And while we mourn some absent friends - the razed block behind the Gooderham flatiron, for instance - the little parks that replaced them also add depth.

As for a major capital like Paris, and the effect tall buildings are having on the skyline, I tend to compare it with Rome on the one hand and London on the other. What unique balance will it strike, I wonder?

 

[newuser2k9]

Sorry to revive this old thread by this is what I dream for Montparnasse.
A little drawing made by myself.

The best way to integrate Montparnasse tower is to build new skyscrapers around (many people agree with idea including big architects like Jean Nouvel).
It is also a good way to give a new birth at the district of Montparnasse by adding new activities and destroying the ugly old bockhaus mall.

The idea (and I am not the only to have this on) is to tranform Montparnasse in a Parisian Times Square.

No, no, and no.

Paris has a Times Square. It's called the Champs Elysees. Anyone there on New Years (St. Sylvestre) will see crowds that put New York to shame.

Montparnasse is a delightful, middle-class area, with a lot of Paris' cineplexes - a centre of culture in the Rive Gauche. Sure, it isn't as touristy as some parts, but that's also it's charm as well.

Personally, I'd just keep the towers at La Defense. It really is not that far from the historic city, and more towers would improve the already impressive terminus (best seen from the top of the Louvre) for the worlds best monumental axis. It just makes sense to preserve as much of Paris for as long as is possible - excepting the older parts of the Left Bank it's one of the best laid out cities in the world, rivaling only very few parts of Japan.

 

[Minato ku]

When I speak of a Times Square, it is for the lighting and nightlife not for the number of tourist. (Honestly I don't care at all of the tourists).
No Montparnasse is not perfect and it is less and less a middle class area as they cannot afford in the inner city.
I prefer a distict full of office with shop instead of bourgeois ghetto area (what become most of the 5th, 6th, 7th and signifiant part of the 14th and 15th arrondissements).
If bourgeois and yuppies want a pacefull area they can life far in the suburbs.

La Defense is too small to keep skyscrapers just here.

 

[newuser2k9]

When I speak of a Times Square, it is for the lighting and nightlife not for the number of tourist. (Honestly I don't care at all of the tourists).
No Montparnasse is not perfect and it is less and less a middle class area as they cannot afford in the inner city.
I prefer a distict full of office with shop instead of bourgeois ghetto area (what become most of the 5th, 6th, 7th and signifiant part of the 14th and 15th arrondissements).
If bourgeois and yuppies want a pacefull area they can life far in the suburbs.

La Defense is too small to keep skyscrapers just here.

Champs Elysees not bright enough, please. La Defense not opportune for development, also groundless.

Just for the record, the 'bourgeois' you speak of are the middle class, if you didn't know.

It seems you don't find Paris your type of city. Why, then, destroy it, to replicate New York, when we already have New York, not to mention Hong Kong, Shanghai, LA, Sydney, Dubai, etc. There's only one Paris, but there are thousands of modern cities that have virtually the same make up. Don't ruin one of the best places in the world to make it fit in.

 

[Minato ku]

It is the oposite I love Paris and that's why I don't it to be transformed in a museum gated community for tourist and rich people.

I prefer a central Paris full of worker, changing with the times and that attract middle class and working class people as it always was.

The middle and working class are not attracted by overpriced cafe, trap french food or really expensive restaurants, expensive design cloth, trap painting and souvenir shop.
Like it or hate it but working and middle class are more attracted by jobs, chains, ethnic shops...etc

Now I don't understand what is the problem of remplacing ugly 70's buildings by skyscrapers in Montparnasse.
Paris is a CITY not a museum.

Just for the record, the 'bourgeois' you speak of are the middle class, if you didn't know.

Not it is not middle class, it is at least UPPER middle class.
The large majority of middle class cannot afford to live inner Paris, they live in suburbs so please don't excluse them of Central Paris.

 

[newuser2k9]

It is the oposite I love Paris and that's why I don't it to be transformed in a museum gated community for tourist and rich people.

I prefer a central Paris full of worker, changing with the times and that attract middle class and working class people as it always was.

The middle and working class are not attracted by overpriced cafe, trap french food or really expensive restaurants, expensive design cloth, trap painting and souvenir shop.
Like it or hate it but working and middle class are more attracted by jobs, chains, ethnic shops...etc

Now I don't understand what is the problem of remplacing ugly 70's buildings by skyscrapers in Montparnasse.
Paris is a CITY not a museum.

Not it is not middle class, it is at least UPPER middle class.
The large majority of middle class cannot afford to live inner Paris, they live in suburbs so please don't excluse them of Central Paris.

It's not like I disagree with you on your wanting 'real' cities. I'm much the same. Venice, for example, has, in my opinion, become nothing but a theme park. One cannot but hate Piazzo San Marco and most areas within 1km of the Grand Canal in the peak of tourist season. That said, would I prefer that Venice had 'modernized' (however highly unlikely) and became just a bunch of glass and steel towers on an artificial sand bar? No, not at all. Because not only is the history so profound, but there are areas off the beaten track, areas with soul, the soul of the few residents that call this once-magnificent city home. And that will never go away.

Paris is not the same. It can be overrun with tourists (sometimes it happens), but it is still home to approximately more than 5 million inside the ring road. Some might be forced forced to leave in the coming years, and for sure there will be dilution in key cultural aspects (such as food ), but, by and by, Paris is still a centre in France for more things than tourism. People will continue to live and work there in the same numbers far into the future, just as in New York since post-70s gentrification. There are many reasons why residents and businesses are attached to central Paris, predominantly the same thing that draws tourists; culture. And I think the mass tourism we still see glimpses of will be gone soon enough. We're going to run out of oil very soon, and as it costs more money for jet fuel ticket prices will have to climb astronomically. In 50 years time I don't think it will be possible to have not only the intercontinental rates we have but also the ridiculous intra continental rates they have in Europe. Paris will pull out in the end.

PS: Again, the bourgeoisie as a demographic can refer to anyone beginning at middle class. The aristocratie more aptly defines the wealthy elite. To be bourgeois in today's world means to effectively to be well educated and involved in, or married to a member of, a profession. In the West, that essentially entails all but the very bottom of the middle class.

 

[Minato ku]

It's not like I disagree with you on your wanting 'real' cities. I'm much the same. Venice, for example, has, in my opinion, become nothing but a theme park. One cannot but hate Piazzo San Marco and most areas within 1km of the Grand Canal in the peak of tourist season. That said, would I prefer that Venice had 'modernized' (however highly unlikely) and became just a bunch of glass and steel towers on an artificial sand bar? No, not at all.

Don't worry.
I don't want to tranform the center of Paris in bunch of glass where everything old is remplaced but I don't want to transform center of Paris in a museum where nothing can change and it is impossible to build modern thing.

This is possible, of course some district will be almost entirely old, maybe some mostly modern but most would be a mix with old and modern (the ratio of old or modern would also change depending the area).
We had a similar discution in a french forum about the possiblity of destroying some average Haussmannian buildings when a good project would be proposed instead of it.
The Haussmannian building are not rare and I think that the city will gain more in accepting this good projet than refusing it to preserve a building in a style common in the all inner city.

Montparnasse to build skyscrapers is according me a very smart idea.
The area is very well desserved by transport, it does already has high-rises and the new skyscraper would remplace ugly 70's low or midrises building.
I am not proposing towers in the middle of Ile de la Cite or Marais.

 

[Urban Shocker]

There's a similar resistance to change in Toronto. A residential neighbourhood called "The Annex" is pervasive with hefty brick houses that were built about 30 years after your Haussmannian district, in a unique Toronto Style that combined Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque forms. While it would be refreshing to see some contemporary architecture inserted there, and a dialogue of forms set up, it's unlikely to happen ... unless someone drives a big flatbed truck with a huge wrecking ball through there one night and takes out a few dozen at random. Wheeee!!!!

Other Toronto downtown districts, where factory and warehouse buildings sat empty for years, are now seeing them adapted to new uses, with contemporary buildings added - offices, retail, residential, cultural. It can be an attractive mix.

One of the most embarrassing Toronto architectural trends in recent memory - building residential towers in faux decorative styles, either pre-Revolutionary French chateaux or Haussmann-style, for instance - is being shamed out of existence ( in our downtown at least ) and replaced with some decent contemporary architecture by good local firms. They gave these faux apartment buildings silly names - "The French Quarter" was one. Another fake more-or-less Second Empire style building ( with a double mansard roof ) called "Design Guild" is planned - developers apparently think everyone wants to be either Louis XIV or Napoleon III. We've also got a large stock of Modernist houses from the 1950s and 1960s, but quite a few of them are being renovated to look like French chateaux too! What a crazy world.

 

[newuser2k9]

Don't worry.
I don't want to tranform the center of Paris in bunch of glass where everything old is remplaced but I don't want to transform center of Paris in a museum where nothing can change and it is impossible to build modern thing.

This is possible, of course some district will be almost entirely old, maybe some mostly modern but most would be a mix with old and modern (the ratio of old or modern would also change depending the area).
We had a similar discution in a french forum about the possiblity of destroying some average Haussmannian buildings when a good project would be proposed instead of it.
The Haussmannian building are not rare and I think that the city will gain more in accepting this good projet than refusing it to preserve a building in a style common in the all inner city.

Montparnasse to build skyscrapers is according me a very smart idea.
The area is very well desserved by transport, it does already has high-rises and the new skyscraper would remplace ugly 70's low or midrises building.
I am not proposing towers in the middle of Ile de la Cite or Marais.

Inner Paris should be a museum for all intensive purposes. I don't object to the occasional infill with a modern design as is the case near the Luxembourg or in the vicinity Montparnasse Metro, but La Tour Montparnasse is enough - it just does not fit with the massing of the city, partially destroying the scale of the rive gauche. Paris is one of the very few magical cities in Europe to come out of the War unscathed - something not even Rome can attest to. If one desires to see interplay between the old and new, look to Amsterdam or Berlin. Even Montparnasse has its charm, and it's sites (even if something like La Cupole is not in its original form), but preserving the planning of the city itself is even more essential. Any more highrises would obstruct more sight lines and tarnish a by all accounts perfect, but not contemporary, core.

There's a similar resistance to change in Toronto. A residential neighbourhood called "The Annex" is pervasive with hefty brick houses that were built about 30 years after your Haussmannian district, in a unique Toronto Style that combined Queen Anne and Richardsonian Romanesque forms. While it would be refreshing to see some contemporary architecture inserted there, and a dialogue of forms set up, it's unlikely to happen ... unless someone drives a big flatbed truck with a huge wrecking ball through there one night and takes out a few dozen at random. Wheeee!!!!

Other Toronto downtown districts, where factory and warehouse buildings sat empty for years, are now seeing them adapted to new uses, with contemporary buildings added - offices, retail, residential, cultural. It can be an attractive mix.

One of the most embarrassing Toronto architectural trends in recent memory - building residential towers in faux decorative styles, either pre-Revolutionary French chateaux or Haussmann-style, for instance - is being shamed out of existence ( in our downtown at least ) and replaced with some decent contemporary architecture by good local firms. They gave these faux apartment buildings silly names - "The French Quarter" was one. Another fake more-or-less Second Empire style building ( with a double mansard roof ) called "Design Guild" is planned - developers apparently think everyone wants to be either Louis XIV or Napoleon III. We've also got a large stock of Modernist houses from the 1950s and 1960s, but quite a few of them are being renovated to look like French chateaux too! What a crazy world.

Oh, the great 'interplay of forms' between faux-Haussmann and the Rogers parking lot across the street! By all stretches of the word, that part of Yonge, from the cemetery until just south of Eglinton has no particular architectural standard to live up to, so one can appreciate the density in the underdeveloped area. It is better than a parking lot. Bloor West, on the other hand, does have some decent modern buildings, and who can forget the Prii and the beautiful repurposed house/station on Spadina for reminders of the present?

A city is not only characterized by its architecture, but also its people. One would have no doubt about the modernity of an older style from the cleanliness, mannerisms, fashion, and technology that all separate it from its recent past. It will continue to evolve as well, but some parts of it, for example the massing, are to critical to change.

Consider this philosophy. The majority of the Paris we see today was constructed in an epoch centered around the 19th century, when the city was the centre of world culture, much like renaissance Florence, or present-day New York. The reason it is the most visited city in the world is not only the attractiveness of the built form but also to walk in the footsteps of the great writers, painters, playwrights, composers, philosophers, and other figures of that period. As LA has begun to take prominence in world culture, we are seeing the same kind of preservationism in New York, and I think that would be warranted. The city itself becomes art, like the vast expanses of which it inspired.

 

[Minato ku]

Inner Paris should be a museum for all intensive purposes. I don't object to the occasional infill with a modern design as is the case near the Luxembourg or in the vicinity Montparnasse Metro, but La Tour Montparnasse is enough - it just does not fit with the massing of the city, partially destroying the scale of the rive gauche. Paris is one of the very few magical cities in Europe to come out of the War unscathed - something not even Rome can attest to. If one desires to see interplay between the old and new, look to Amsterdam or Berlin. Even Montparnasse has its charm, and it's sites (even if something like La Cupole is not in its original form), but preserving the planning of the city itself is even more essential. Any more highrises would obstruct more sight lines and tarnish a by all accounts perfect, but not contemporary, core.

No Paris and its center is a CITY not a museum made for few people that want to see a so called old world.
If they want stereotypes they can go in Las Vegas.
Paris is made for its inhabitants, what want the inhabitants : jobs and housing.

A museum Paris center is the best way to exclude the majority of the population of the center.
The magical Paris don't exist when you live inside it, it only exit when you vist it.
Is your idea of Paris is really for the inhabitants or the tourists ?

A city is not only characterized by its architecture, but also its people. One would have no doubt about the modernity of an older style from the cleanliness, mannerisms, fashion, and technology that all separate it from its recent past. It will continue to evolve as well, but some parts of it, for example the massing, are to critical to change.

If you are against the modern building in the center of Paris, you condradict yourself.
No the massing is not critical to change, the problem is that we never heard the silent majority.
We don't show at them the reality, the real fact.

It is because inner Paris don't build enouth that we had riot, many homeless, a lack of housing, transportation problem.

Consider this philosophy. The majority of the Paris we see today was constructed in an epoch centered around the 19th century,

The 20th century was by far the most active century of construction in Paris.
Is the majority of Paris that you believe, is really the majority of Paris ?

The reason it is the most visited city in the world is not only the attractiveness of the built form but also to walk in the footsteps of the great writers, painters, playwrights, composers, philosophers, and other figures of that period. As LA has begun to take prominence in world culture, we are seeing the same kind of preservationism in New York, and I think that would be warranted. The city itself becomes art, like the vast expanses of which it inspired.

I don't care of the tourists, they only represent a small part of the economy (something like 3%), financial services are a way more revelent to the city.
The problem is that many people only see Paris as the outdated stereotypes, don't know the reality of the city and don't even know the real histority of the city. (A city that evolued)

The chinese restaurants, ethnic shops, fast foods, global chains ec... is much more the reality of Paris than the composer, playwrights, painters, great writers of the past.
The magical Paris is not for the inhabitants, it is more against them. Tourists should understand that Paris is real city of the 21st century.
So a museum Paris is against its history, against its population and for what ? $25 billion out $700 billion, an extreme segegration, the "abandonment" of most of the big transportation system.
It would truly be a social and economic suicide.