Place de la République – An interview with TVK

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.

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Taking the Next Step: Paris Leads With Innovation in the Streets

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.

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Paris Bookshops

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.

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The Unveiling of the New Place de la République

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.

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