Man About Town

During my sojourn here, I've been trying to capture a little of what the experience has been like walking around Paris and visiting the countryside (which, so far, I've only done once, thanks to Pierre and his mother, Stephanie).

Thanks to a turn in life 20 years ago when I lived with some architecture grad students in Ann Arbor Michigan, I have long been interested in and have appreciated architecture - not only for how it looks, but what images and memories it can conjure, how it interacts with its surroundings and with the people whom it serves, how it plays with, focuses, and delivers light, and how elegantly it does (or does not, all too often) serves its purpose.

Doing residential projects in the US, I think about all of these things a lot. Being here in Paris, surrounded by so many beautiful buildings and structures, I can't help but think of it every day.

One of the things that I think about constantly here is how much craftsmanship was and is involved in many of these structures. While the trend for many years has been towards a minimalist form of modern architecture, with extensive use of steel, glass, and concrete, I have always found these structures cold and impersonal. Not 100% of them, but most. Through the use of geometric qualities like sharp angles (Louis Kahn) and huge spaces (the new American Airlines terminal in NYC), I feel that much of this architecture is impressive in CAD and when viewed as an abstraction, but while some of these structures have played interesting games with light and form, the loss of connection to human scale and to a connection with the earth or with people has disturbed me.

The grand architecture of Paris, realized in edifices like the Petite Palais (see photo) and the Grand Palais, the bridges across the Seine, the cathedrals, and the thousands of 16th, 17th, and 18th century buildings also suffer, at times from a crisis of proportion - they were meant to impress - but unlike the huge expanses of steel, concrete and glass that are found in modern structures, the human touch is to be found in every square inch of these monuments to craftsmanship. The detailed carved stone, mosaics, leaded-glass windows, light fixtures, ironwork, and sculptures each call out for your focused attention and alert you to the human touch that went into crafting each little part. The big modern slab concepts could just as well have been formed in a factory by some machines, transported by other machines, and put in place by yet other machines. The human is not evident.

Walking around town, appreciating craftsmanship by sculptors, stonemasons, iron smiths, and mosaicists at every turn, I feel connected to them through their work, appreciative of their art and skill, and connected to the past in which they lived and crafted their works. This tangible connection to a distant past is something most Americans don't generally get to experience (outside, perhaps, for some parts of New England. Heck, in San Francisco, we consider anything built before 1911 historic. In Paris, London, Rome, Athens and Jerusalem, among other places, that's downright modern.

Unlike the grand monuments, when it comes to the functional buildings of Paris - the apartments, the restaurants, the offices - the focus is definitely about human scale. A typical 1BR apt here is usually about 30 sq. metres (about 300 sq. ft.). The restaurants pack the tables in tight - you usually have to pull the little 2-tops out into the aisle to get in and out of the seat by the wall. Older shops tend to be very intimate - it helps to walk in sideways ;^)

While our first impression is often that these places are too small, as Americans raised on large spaces (think Wal-Mart or Target or even the typical Il Fornaio), the intimacy forces you to forego unnecessary "stuff" in your apartment and gives you a good reason to strike up a conversation with those people at the next table whose elbows you keep bumping against. Paris hs t