Page 2 of 8
Paris, France
We should let this dead guy sleep, we should let this dead guy sleep
From the very top of the escalator, this is the view over Paris from the landmark Pompidou Centre.
The Pompidou Centre was a collaboration between Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, two architects who no longer collaborate but been independently successful since. Two days before I took this picture I was standing inside Richard Rogers' offices, one of the sites that was participating in Open House London. There the well meaning tour guide (an architect on staff) talked a little bit about his firm's attitude toward color, describing it as the cheapest and easiest way to express design and certainly nothing to be afraid of. The Pompidou Centre that initially shocked Paris was not afraid of color at all, and considering the direction that both Piano and Rogers have taken since then, you just know that the color part had to be Richard Rogers idea. At the Pompidou the ducts used to be blue, the pipes green, the conduits yellow and the circulation elements were red. What's there today is shocking but also not all that shocking anymore, the color has been washed away and repainted white or gray, far more boring than I remember and not quite as much fun as it used to be. Not that the gerbil tube circulation system and the exposed systems are without merit (they most certainly are), but it somehow seemed to have more of an edge when it was still in technicolor. Who were we when we were who we were back then indeed.
Recently I watched the film "Holy Motors" which contains some great scenes at Père Lachaise Cemetery. The main character (Oscar) runs crazily barefoot through the cemetery, eating flowers and terrorizing locals before he bites off a woman's fingers and carries of a fashion model into the sewers. The movie may have some strange moments (things like talking cars, musical sequences and a character married to a monkey) but it did somehow manage to capture the feel of the cemetery in a way that might be otherwise hard to describe. Otherwise don't expect the film to make sense, just enjoy the ride.
Père Lachaise itself is one of the most famous cemeteries in the world and certainly the most famous in Paris. It is where Baron Haussmann, Moliere, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison and Georges Seurat are interred, among thousands of others. And while death may be the final great equalizer, not all tombs have been created equal. Many still seem intent on showing off to the neighbors, something which makes a walk through the cemetery more than just a let's-find-the-famous-dead-people exercise and instead a reflection of what Parisians really think (or thought) about themselves.
This is the Paris Architecture Museum (La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine if you're French), a terrific museum right at the Trocadero and right near that inescapable tower everyone always talks about. The museum has two far different floors, the first focuses on historic artifacts and giant plaster casts of pieces of cathedrals and other historic buildings, while and upper floor has table after table of models of modern and contemporary architecture. It is also the only place on earth where you can see and imagine Jean Nouvel's wondrous Tour Sans Fins, unless you count that awful Wim Wenders movie ("Until the End of the World"). And honestly that's a hard one to count on any level.
As for this picture from inside the museum, I guess I'd look pretty upset too if I had no body and a dragon looking thing on my head.
I really wasn't in Paris all that long, it was more of a glorified stopover than anything else, part of an itinerary that was tweaked to allow a full day and night there but really not much else. Traditionally that is how I have seen the city, usually checking my bags at Gare du Nord or Austerlitz or Gare de l'Est, walking all day in the city and then boarding a midnight train to Amsterdam or Berlin or Barcelona. Of the seven times that I have been to Paris in the past fifteen years, only twice have I really stayed overnight somewhere in the city, only twice have I allowed myself to focus on where I was instead of where I was going.
