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An EYE on PARIS People, Places, Architecture, Art

An EYE on PARIS from Rick Meghiddo on Vimeo.

What makes cities great? Streets, public spaces, and architecture physically express its residents’ values, belief systems, lifestyles, and self-expression through the arts. Lifestyle is expressed through our work, how we act, spend our leisure time, and follow social patterns.

“An Eye on Paris” focuses on observing daily life and on some new outstanding works of architecture, public spaces, and some museums (there are about 130 in the city) less notorious than the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.

View from the Centre Pompidou

LIFESTYLE

The French honor the time dedicated to eating. Sitting around the table for a meal is sacred in French culture. People are always concerned about the quality of their food ingredients. That is why they are loyal to their local farmers’ market and tend to do most of their shopping there.

Cafés in Paris have always served as social spaces, the classic Parisian meeting place to relax or refresh. During the summer, outdoor terraces are packed with people.

Paris has many outdoor events. In this documentary, we captured some of the yearly Day of Music and one of the many places offered to dance by the Seine, in this case, at the Quai Saint-Bernard.

PARKS

We studied three parks: the Park de Bercy, the Park de la Villette, and the Promenade Plantée.

 

 

PARC DE BERCY
Designed by architects Bernard Huet, Madeleine Ferrand, Jean-Pierre Feugas, Bernard Leroy, and by landscapers Ian Le Caisne and Philippe Raguin, the park is made of three gardens connected by footbridges: The “Romantic Garden”, which includes fishponds and dunes; The “Flowerbeds”, dedicated to plant life; and “The Meadows”, an area of open lawns shaded by tall trees.
In the north-east of the park stands the Cinémathèque Française (the former American Center) designed by Frank Gehry, and on the raised terraces are the 21 sculptures of Rachid Khimoune’s “Children of the World” installation, created in 2001 to honor children’s rights.
The park is adjacent to a major sports arena, the Palais Omnisports, with a sitting capacity of 20,000.

PARC DE LA VILLETTE

The Parc de la Villette is a 37-acre / 55 hectares area that houses one of Paris’ largest concentrations of cultural venues. These include the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie (City of Science and Industry, Europe’s largest science museum), three major concert venues, and the prestigious Conservatoire de Paris.

The park was designed by architect Bernard Tschumi in partnership with Colin Fournier on the site of the huge Parisian abattoirs (slaughterhouses) and the national wholesale meat market. He conceived thirty-five architectural “follies “to give a sense of orientation to the visitors. In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily as an ornament but suggesting through its appearance some other purpose.

Since the creation of the park, museums, concert halls, and theatres have been designed by several noted contemporary architects. These include the City of Science and Industry, La Géode (an IMAX theatre inside of a 36-meter / 118 ft diameter geodesic dome;) The City of Music, designed by Christian de Portzamparc, which opened in 1995 and it also includes a museum of historical musical instruments with a concert hall, also home of the Conservatoire de Paris. The Philharmonie de Paris opened in January 2015, designed by Jean Nouvel.

PROMENADE PLANTÉE

The Promenade Plantée is an extensive green belt that follows the old Vincennes railway line. Beginning just east of the Opéra Bastille with the elevated Viaduc des Arts, it follows a 4.7 km (2.9 mi) (2.9 mi) path to the Bois de Vincennes. At its west end, near the Bastille, the parkway rises above the surrounding area and forms the Viaduc des Arts, over a line of shops featuring arts and crafts.

The design was created by landscape architect Jacques Vergely and architect Philippe Mathieux. The Viaduc des Arts was designed by architect Patrik Berger, who also designed the recently completed Canopy of Les Halles. The project includes different types of gardens, it traverses existing buildings, and it crosses boulevards. Twenty years after its construction, the Promenade Plantée inspired the successful High Line in New York.

THE LOUIS VUITTON FOUNDATION BUILDING

The Louis Vuitton Foundation building was designed by Frank Gehry. It is a museum and cultural center like no other one. This unique 11,000 square-meter monument of 21st-century architecture was conceived as an iceberg surrounded by glass that takes the form of a sailboat’s sails inflated by the wind. The structure of the glass roof allows the building to collect and reuse rainwater and improves its geothermal power.

THE FOUNDATION JÉRÔME SEYDOUX-PATHÉ

Foundation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé

You can walk along Avenue de Gobelins and not notice a hidden gem of architecture designed by Renzo Piano. The clever use of the site includes a main entrance on a restored and preserved facade along the Avenue des Gobelins which features sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

The Foundation Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé is dedicated to preserving the history of the French film company Pathè and to promote cinematography. It houses its archives and the foundation’s offices. It is located in the courtyard of a 19th-century block that includes a complex of historical Hausmann-era buildings. The 839 m2 headquarters is located in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. Its construction was completed in September 2014. The site’s major limits determined the peculiar design, which looks like a greenhouse.

NEW PALAIS DE JUSTICE – COURTHOUSE

New Paris Courthouse

The new Courthouse, located on the northern edge of Paris, is 160 meters high, have an internal area of around 100,000 m2 and accommodates up to 8,000 people per day. The complex reunites 90 courtrooms and about 1,300 offices under one roof. In developing the scheme, Renzo Piano sought to reduce the apparent scale of the building by breaking it down into four volumes of decreasing size. They include three roof terraces with 500 trees and other vegetation. From an environmental standpoint, the project employs a range of strategies including the use of natural ventilation, the incorporation of photovoltaic panels on the façade, and the collection of rainwater.

THE CANOPY OF LES HALLES

Canope of Les Halles

The long-awaited cultural center and metro station were created by architects Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti on the site of a historic Paris marketplace. The design at Les Halles is known as the Canopy due to its enormous umbrella-like glass roof, which comprises 18,000 pieces of glass supported by 7,000 tons of steel.

The completed Canopy and the center below replace a deeply unpopular concrete shopping complex – nicknamed “the hole of Les Halles” – which was built in the place of the market’s original 19th-century glass and iron buildings designed by architect Victor Baltard. They were demolished in the 1970s in an act many critics have described as cultural vandalism.

The creation of a humane urban quality does not depend only on the quality of a city’s buildings. The design quality of open public spaces, way beyond landscape architecture, is critical. It demands imaginative long-term thinking accompanied by the political vision and will.

Frank Gehry 2021 A Playful Ninety-two Years Young Master

We are not surprised by Frank Gehry surprising us as an architect. We know that he is also prolific as an artist. What surprised me this time is that, at ninety-two, following a pandemic year when he had to lay 170 people working at his office, is that he has not stopped pushing the envelope of creativity. 

Gehry’s dual exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills (June 24 – August 6, 2021) is remarkable. The ground floor exhibition is titled Spinning Tales and shows several hanged Fish Lamps made for the first time in polyvinyl and copper. This last version of his fishes evolved through large-scale sculptures, such as Standing Glass Fish at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, 1986; the 22-meter high fish for a fish restaurant in Kobe, Japan, 1987; and El Peix (The Fish) at the Barcelona Olympics, 1992.

The upper floor immersive installation, Wishful Thinking, is based on a scene of Alice Adventures in Wonderland. Framing the show is a mirror wall and a textured chain-link fence. This artwork echoes preceding architectural works such as the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, 2000; the Marqués de Riscal Hotel, Elciego, Spain; and the Biomuseo in Panama City, 2014.

During the last nine years, I documented three of his architectural masterpieces: Disney Hall in Los Angeles in 2012, the Lou Ruvo Center for Mental Health in Las Vegas in 2013, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris in 2018. This is the first time that I approach his artwork unlinked to a building. Although the scale and complexity of architecture and art can be very different, this exhibition proves that one medium can feed into the other.

As We Saw It – Part 4: Brushing Art in Paris Art as Integral to Urban Life Quality

Paris without art is inconceivable. The art world permeates the city at all levels. It impacts people’s lifestyle, what they eat and its aesthetics, their fashion, their filmmaking, their architecture.

As We Saw It – Part 4: Brushing Art in Paris is a potpourri of art seen during the summer of 2018. The focus was on alternatives to traditional tourist art-sites such as the Louvre and the Orsay museums.

The biggest surprise was the Palais de Tokyo. Sitting next door to Paris’ Museum of Modern Art, this place it has an intense program of avant-garde contemporary art that includes all media. In spite of its name, the artists – many women – shown are from many countries. We found remarkable the works of Anita Molinero, Caroline Achaintre, and Laure Prouvost

The Museum of Modern Art, besides its own collection, also has periodical shows. During our visit we so a retrospective of Judit Reigl’s fantastic work. She continues to be productive at age ninety-five!

The Centre Pompidou had a large exhibition on the Russian avant-garde in Vitebsk during the 1918-1922 period. Very well curated, it showed artworks by Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich.

The Picasso Museum was a surprise, not so much for the collection of the master’s work – that can’t match those shown at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona – but of Picasso’s own collection of other artists works, such as Miro and Modigliani.

We found the relatively small Musée de l’Orangerie collection exquisite for the quality of the works exhibited. Besides Claude Monet’s large paintings of water lilies, the show included first-rate works by Matisse, Soutine, Picasso, Modigliani, Renoir, Utrillo, and Pollock, to name some.

The Guimet Museum of Asian Arts has an extraordinary collection of Chinese, Cambodian, and Indian art. On both the Orangerie and the Guimet, the presence of children being taught about art was uplifting. Its renovation was sensibly designed by architects Henri and Bruno Gaudin. 

Other visits included the Grand Palais‘ retrospective on the work of František Kupka, the Petit Palais with great art from the late 1800s, and the new Louis Vuitton Foundation, by Frank Gehry, shown in Part 2: Paris Builds.

Street art in Paris has become part of the urban components, as in many other cities. Some are very good, like the works of JR.

 

Muhamad Bourouissa, Urban Riders, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris (2018)