The Grand Louvre by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners with SCAU won the AIA’s 25 year award for 2017.
AIA Architect published an article on the project a quarter century on penned by Dominic Mercier, for which I was interviewed.
You can read the piece at The Ancient Regime’s Fatal Blow on the AIA Architect web site.
This week was unveiled a vast and keenly awaited new building in the center of Paris. While the new Les Halles brings new amenities to Parisians and is without doubt an improvement on what was there before, it is also rife with failings and missed opportunities.
Paris has a prestigious history, but it is also a living city. A new project in the 15th arrondissement gives a sense of how contemporary developments can create a dialogue with the multiple facets of the existing city in order to densify and enrich it.
Eight months after the opening of the new Place de la République, I sat down with Pierre-Alain Trévelo, one of the two partners of TVK, the up-and-coming Paris-based firm responsible for the square’s design, for an inside take on the insights and learnings from this emblematic project.
This week I have written a guest post for the Project for Public Spaces’ blog. PPS sees the proactive approach Paris is taking with its public spaces as “fundamental to the future of cities.” Read the piece on the the PPS web site.
A beautiful August day was the chance for a visit to the Villa Savoye, to which I hadn’t been in years. A few weeks after my visit of the Le Corbusier show at MOMA, it was a real pleasure to connect with Corbu’s work in flesh and blood, as it were.
Paris’s identity is deeply rooted in the fact that it is a literary city. Since the days of Villon and Du Beslay, the art of the word has had a special place in this city.
The craft of writing benefits from a special aura here, a spirit that has fostered the development of generations of French talent and attracted wave after wave of foreigners.
This in turn has led the city to be particularly frequently and fondly treated in the world of letters, which has helped to forge the extraordinarily unique and powerful collective unconscious of what Paris represents, to further the myth of this Parnassus on the Seine.
A week ago, Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë inaugurated the new Place de la République. Last Wednesday, he was on the banks of the river Seine, inaugurating another emblematic project of his municipal administration, the newly pedestrianized banks of the Seine.
I described in a previous post how the place de la République has been a 150-year urban design headache. So when I visited the space on the day of its opening, after nearly two years of construction, what I wanted to know was if the urban design conundrum had finally been solved.
The Seine has risen to surprising levels this year. My friend Laurent Deburge has taken a series of wonderful pictures capturing this special moment.