Visual Description: Map of Paris marked by hand with black ink lines. The lines describe all the spaces visited during the study trip. The long clear diagonal line, describes the section walk undertaken and shown in the model below.
THIS IS NOT A NEW CITY [ PARIS ]
2012 // THESIS PROJECT / PART TWO // AARHUS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE [DK]
[ P A R I S ]
[ City Condition, part one ] [ Aarhus, part three ] [ The Model, part four ] [ Manifesto ]
[ preface ]
I went to Paris, not to bring back a piece of Paris, but to learn from the different spatial qualities the city offers. To investigate the potential and recognize how city conditions are developed.
When contemplating Paris, the images that spring to mind are of vibrant street life. In Paris, life is lived on the streets; it is at the cafés, in the galleries, and bars. Paris encompasses a vast number of public gathering points; the very city is built as a public space, constructed for the meeting of people, encouraging interaction.
“Apartment buildings displayed and oriented a collective that communicated fully with the public street [...] The space of early nineteenth-century Parisian buildings mingled with the space of streets in concrete, quotidian ways.” The streetscape changes throughout the day with the galleries and cafés. Most of the galleries have an open door policy and the cafés are more often than not, able to open their entire facade, inside and outside merging as the café-space flows into the streetscape.
Besides this, there is a wealth of small inner courtyards opening towards the street. When exploring these you are in for a surprise, every once in a while they are not courtyards at all, but small passages. In the courtyard or passage, here you will find a small milieu, sometimes there is a café at others a gallery, and a small gap leads to a bright opening arranged around a tree. It is this abundance of spatial experience that enhances the desire, the urge to discover the city.
“The writers who represented the city to itself thus not only emphasized apartment houses as elements of Parisian landscape but also saw through the apartment house, treating it as a lens or as a point of view and not simply as an opaque visual object. In the process, they imagined apartment houses to be as transparent as they wanted the city to be.” I read this not as a longing for literal transparency, but rather a phenomenal one, as described by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky. The quote holds no real value if it is understood as a desire for the literal transparency of the glasshouses. It is in the phenomenal transparency that real understanding lies. Here the threshold between the city, the public, and the apartment, the private blurs resulting in the annexation of the apartment into the city.
The flâneur is from Paris. He drifts around in space and experiences the city with his body. “The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria - now a landscape, now a room”
The flâneur turns the cityscape into the landscape, the interior to exterior, whereby the city becomes an interior landscape at the will of the flâneur. Through the concept of similitude, the flâneur holds an ability to superimpose space.
“The discourse of urban observation described the apartment building as a typical and integral physical feature of the Parisian landscape and, strikingly, as a figure for the objects and activity of urban observation itself.” The quote furthers the conception of the apartment being an active, almost public part of the city and hereby also a territory for the flâneur.
Visual Description: The Section Walk Model, wood, leather strap, and digital color prints. Photographed on a black background. The model consists of wood slats, connected with a leather string and mounted photo slices from the section walk, together they describe an elongated street space, as well as the walk in time. See the conceptual drawing below.
Visual Description: Hand and digital drawing. At the top is a series of photographs, a red rectangle is indicates area of the photo being collected and put together. The rectangle is starting at the furthest left and moving towards the right with each consecutive photo until reaching the far right side on the last photo. All the photos are from the Section Walk, all taken from the middle of the street, looking straight down the streetscape, typically placing plants and buildings on either side and empty sky in the center. This way the strips create an elongated street scape, as the composition between the individual photos are comparable.
Visual Description: The Section Walk Model, photographed on a black background, in plan and elevation. Given the high ratio between the height and width of the model, it can only stand if folded. These folds in time and space, brings together distinct areas of Paris, that are typically not considered connected. The folding also allows for the opportunity to fold the model to create an interior architectural space.
Visual Description: Hand drawing, ink on paper, lines drawn from side to side, attempting to follow each other, but often divergent, creating white spaces between them. The drawing is made while riding the Metro in Paris, registering the movement of the car, by attempting to draw fully parallel lines. Stations typically show up in the drawing as a while spot, given the effect the car coming to a stop has on the drawing motion.
Visual Description: Collection of drawings, showing a line starting at the words “street” and ending at the words “trains”. The line crosses over, up, and down on multiple plateaus. The drawings are tracing the path walked from the street level to the platform at all Metro Stations visited during a study trip.
Visual Description: Three photos of the same model, made from wood, metal, and string. Thin metal rods are bent to create three-dimensional pathways hung with fishing string underneath a grid of metal rods, within an open wood box, the corner joints are crosses, allowing for disassembly. The pathways are made from the drawings above, and starting to speak to the public z-axises city.
Visual Description: Model made from wood, metal, and string. Thin metal rods are bent to create three-dimensional pathways hung with fishing string underneath a grid of metal rods, within an open wood box. The metal rods are supporting digital black-and-white prints, of diverse housing solutions; remixing the existing city in the z-axis.
Visual Description: Hand drawing, ink on paper, of the truly inspiring moment in paris; where the city builds up behind itself and open new passages through city blocks in open air.