[update below]
That’s the title of an erudite, excellently-written article by my friend Claire Berlinski, in the Winter 2018 issue of City Journal, that is a must-read for anyone who knows and loves Paris. Claire hates the modernist architecture that she feels—not without reason—has defaced Paris over the past seven decades and, guns blazing, lets it be known from the get-go. As they say over here, elle n’y va pas avec le dos de la cuillère. I largely agree with her, though do not possess her knowledge of architecture or the architectural history of Paris—despite having lived here for most of the past thirty years—so can only offer my personal opinions.
E.g. I don’t share Claire’s dislike of the Pei pyramid at the Louvre. I was impressed when seeing it for the first time, on the evening before its inauguration in 1988, and haven’t revised my view. It was certainly an improvement over what preceded it—a parking lot for the Ministry of Finance, which occupied the Richelieu wing of the Louvre before President Mitterrand sent it packing to Bercy. As for its incongruity in that space, I kind of like that.
The Pompidou Center: When I saw it for the first time, with my mother and a friend, in precisely December 1976 (it was completed but hadn’t yet opened), we went “WTF is that!!” Everyone has decided views on the place: My mother hates it but I’ve always liked it, more or less, and have visited it often from the late ’70s on. And what preceded it hardly merits nostalgia. The only thing that caused me to think that perhaps it should not have been built in the first place—that there were some major flaws in its design—was learning of the astronomical maintenance and heating costs. As for what Claire says about “drug dealers, pickpockets, and voyous” coming in from the banlieues to “loiter around” the place, and with “the derelicts know[ing], somehow, that it was meant for them,” I think she exaggerates a little. That may have been the case years ago but is not today; the area around the Pompidou center is lively at night, with lots of young people (not the kind who will pick your pockets) in the many cool bars and restaurants.
The Mitterrand BNF: I used to give it the thumbs down, having been influenced by Harvard University historian Patrice Higonnet’s early 1990s denunciations of it in the NYRB (subtly entitled Scandal on the Seine and The Lamentable Library), but am agnostic on it now (and I think many who used to criticize it have changed their minds). And given the real risk of flooding from the Seine (which Higonnet ignores), there was probably a good reason to store the books in towers rather than underground.
Grande Arche de La Défense: I don’t have a problem with the building itself but hate where it’s situated, as it obstructs the once clear view through the Arc de Triomphe, when looking up the Champs-Elysées from the Concorde.
Tour Montparnasse: Everyone hates it, of course. How nice it would be to have it pulled down.
Claire doesn’t mention Les Halles. Everyone agrees that the Forum des Halles that replaced the Pavillons Baltard was a travesty, but I am favorably impressed with the renovations, which have greatly improved the place (I pass through there several times a week, so trust me). As for the cost to the Parisian taxpayer, that’s another matter.
One disastrous byproduct of the buildings that went up in Paris from the 1950s to the ’90s is asbestos, which is one of the biggest scandals of the Fifth Republic. Thanks to power of the asbestos lobby, the material was banned in construction in France later (1997) than in other Western countries. In addition to the human cost, the final price tag for asbestos removal will be well into the hundreds of billions of euros, if not more (removing the asbestos from the Zamansky tower—which Claire rightly skewers—and other buildings at the Jussieu campus alone cost close to €2 billion).
Paris may be a beautiful city malgré tout, which no person with normal aesthetic tastes would deny, but this does need to be qualified. Quoting myself, from a post I wrote five years ago on the restored copy of Chris Marker’s 1962 documentary ‘Le Joli Mai’, shot on the streets of Paris:
Large parts of Paris and the inner banlieue were slums. And the city was dirty (polluted, the ancient buildings and monuments caked black with centuries of soot and grime, and generally run down outside les beaux quartiers). For the proletariat, the tours et barres of the cités constructed on a mass scale during those years were a godsend. As a couple of the interviewees [in the documentary] made clear, people couldn’t wait to move out of their quartiers populaires or bidonvilles and into an HLM. Vive le logement social!
And reading Eric Hazan’s The Invention of Paris, one learns that even some of the quartiers in the center of the city—e.g. off the Place Saint-Michel; don’t even talk about the northern and eastern arrondissements—were crumbling slums well into the 20th century. Despite modernism, Paris—like New York, Chicago, and other older, large American cities—probably looks better today than at any point in the past.
UPDATE: Take a look at the website, Save Paris, of the International Coalition for the Preservation of Paris.
I managed to read the Berlinski pamphlet until the end. Quite an achievement ! As the son of a postwar architect and editor of a internationally respected major architectural revue (L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui), I really enjoyed stuff like : “Modernist experiments have damaged cities around the world, but nowhere more so than in Paris. The French Revolution had no malign effect on the city’s architecture. Even invasion by the Nazis failed to destroy the city’s beauty. The postwar architects were the only ones who thought that it would be a good idea to ruin it. ” I think your friend Claire should write another libel about modern French cuisine and how French chefs ruin it, French fashion and how it has deserted the city, etc. It is understood that Mitterand was an uninspired marxist dictator, that commie Hidalgo is a hateful witch and that hélas, hélas, hélas the modern Joan of Arc and good fairy N.K.M. who could have saved Paris from this ugly naufrage has sold out to the sirens of Capgemini… La France est un cas désespéré….
Massilian: I have a feeling you didn’t like Claire B.’s piece too much… 🙂 FYI, she elaborated on it in a tweet storm here.
I do advise Claire B. to read Michel Serres’s pleasant little book : “C’était mieux avant”.. As Simone Signoret cleverly wrote : “La nostalgie n’est plus ce qu’elle était.”
Thanks for the h/t. I picked up a copy of Serres’ book today 😉 Will read.
[…] Arun With a View has a post up about architecture in Paris – always a interesting topic. Every Parisien(ne) has an opinion about it. Being something of a conservative I’m not a huge fan of radical change and so I’m quite pleased that the city of Versailles has extremely strict building codes which favor preservation and restoration à l’identique. […]
I am not against new construction but I do think Paris has done it especially badly especially considering the amount of state funds available for grandiose projects. She rails against everything but doesn’t explain why Paris has fared worse than other cities.
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> I do like the Beaubourg and the Pyramid but little else.
Actually Asbestos was a bigger scandal in Canada where it was not fully banned until about 5 years ago. Asbestos was still being produced in Canada and sold largely to the developing world long after the state was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to remove it from public buildings.
The Asbestos industry in Canada even had their own infamous lobby group called the “Chryesotile Institute” modeled on the old US “tobacco institute” parodied in the US movie “Thank You for Smoking”
Here is a CBC investigative report from just before it was finally banned.
As an aside Donald Trump as in THAT Donald Trump was a huge supporter back in the 1990s of making asbestos legal again in the US. Unfortunately the US media has not choosen to ask his views on the subject lately.
I attended a multimedia presentation several years ago, by an environmental activist, on the Canadian asbestos industry. It was an eye-opener. Between that and the shale oil in Alberta, there are some big problems with environmental policy in Canada.
Is ICPP a joke ? Are these guys serious ? Are people really donating ? And donating for what ? The destruction of all the buildings above 6 floors high ? Legal actions against architects ? Again the city hall ? You must be kidding me !
I learned about the ICPP from Claire, who’s been invited to join its advisory committee.
She tweeted this, BTW, to underscore her position.
I have no doubt they wanted Claire on the board ! All this is so simplistic and caricatural. Let’s put Paris under a glass bell. Let’s stop the clocks when the good Baron George Eugene Haussmann died. He should be Pantheonized. Let’s dress up like in 1891. And then all those horrible cars that pollute Paris should be replaced by fiacres that do not release dangerous fine particles. The best thing would probably be to protect the city from the poor and the unemployed for whom social housing could be built a few kilometres away. Access to the Paris would be reserved for clean, well-behaved, educated people who could enjoy the city’s beauty to the fullest, with no nuisance at all. And to tell the truth, this is the offical plan, it is under way, so don’t be so impatient, valuable things take time.