Glimpses of Parisian Architecture

I was in the tourist zone of Paris 19-21 June and took photos of some buildings I noticed while going about the sightseeing rounds.

Something I like regarding Paris, Prague, Vienna and a few other large European cities is that their central areas have few imposing modernist buildings -- policies are that such structures are relegated to peripheral zones. Your tastes may vary, but I find that modernist building are not very interesting to look at, whereas more traditional architecture often is a visual feast.

The well-kept and well-policed Paris tourist zone extends for a mile or so on either side of the River Seine from near the Eiffel Tower downstream to the vicinity of the Lyon and Austerlitz railroad terminals upstream. The main large modernist structures in that zone are the Tour Montparnasse, Opéra de Paris Bastille and the Centre Pompidou, all a ways away from where four-star tourist attractions are found.

So, "just because," here are some photos I took and didn't even bother to crop or digitally manipulate.

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Rue Grégoire de Tours
Let's start here on the northern segment of the rue. That's my wife impatiently waiting for me to get moving. First, we'll look at the domed building in the background.

117 boulevard Saint-Germain
Did I just say "visual feast?" Well, this segment of a larger building offers a feast of details that don't quite reach rococo levels. Check out that golden shield near the bottom of the image.

Rue Vaugirard et rue Monsieur-le-Prince
Now we're heading up the hill towards the Jardin du Luxembourg. I don't have an address for this building with its whiff of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, but it's on the southeast corner of the intersection.

1 avenue de l'Observatoire
Seen from the Jardin using a telephoto zoom. That interesting dark gray appendage might be a decorative cover for chimneys. In any case, it stands above the rooflines of sourrounding buildings and caught my attention.

Église Saint-Sulpice
The cathedral in Chartres isn't the only large church in France with mis-matched towers. Heading down the hill from the Luxembourg is the Saint-Sulpice, where one tower was rebuilt and the other was left as it was, as is noted here.

Institut de France
Another interesting dome as seen from near the lower end of the rue de Seine.

Musée du Louvre - lobby area under I.M. Pei's pyramid
The Louvre attracts immense crowds during tourist season, so Pei's modern entry area that's mostly buried in one of the palace's courtyards was a necessity. Key is the buried part. Had this complex been at ground level, it would have destroyed the Louvre as an architectural composition. As can be seen in the photo, the interior space has no particular distinction. Moreover, it can be a bit confusing, though not so much as the rest of the Louvre.

Montmartre - steps leading up to the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur
I find the interaction of the stoned planes, the rounded building corner and the stairway interesting.

Gallerie Clairidge, 74 avenue des Champes-Élysées
There is a modern building that can be glimpsed immediately uphill from this very Parisian edifice. Which do you prefer to look at?

Guerlain, 68 avenue des Champs-Élysées
Two door away is Guerlain's building. Beyond is yet another modern one that has more detailing than the modern building in the previous photo. Even so, Guerlain's shames it.

La Tour d'Argent
Finally, back along the Seine is one of Paris' top restaurants, the Tour d'Argent (Silver Tower). As this mentions, the restaurant and building are old, but the top floor with the large windows was added in 1936. I didn't eat here because I can't afford the food and probably wouldn't like it either. Plus, it was closed the day I took the photo.

Extra-Fancy Building Tops: 1930 and 2004

Most modernist architecture is horrible. There: I said it. Actually, I've probably said it before, either on this blog or back when I blogged on 2Blowhards.

For now, I'll spare Faithful Readers a rant on why I think modernist architecture is horrible. Instead, this post deals with a building that from one perspective seems a bit silly, yet from another point of view has some merit.

That building is the Frost Bank Tower (completed 2004) that I recently saw in Austin, Texas. Here's a photo I took:

What the photo doesn't show is the base that's a few stories tall and fills the space out to the sidewalk. That's a good thing in principle, because most pedestrians pretty much view things near eye level rather than gaze upward at tall buildings they're walking past. Unfortunately from an aesthetic point of view, the base and tower designs don't seem to blend well, although they easily could have (scroll down the above link for more views).

I like the massing of the tower, this offering some relief from its stubby proportions. This massing also evokes skyscraper design from its 1925-32 golden age.

The controversial feature is the decorations at the top. A hardcore functionalist observer would collapse with the vapours at such ornamentation. Me?: Although the top is a little "over the top" as they say, I like the idea of tall buildings having something interestingly decorative at their apex.

The opening defined by the four highest spikes recalls the top decor of Rochester, New York's Times Square Building, shown in a postcard view below.

This 1930 treatment is even more outrageous than that of the Frost Tower. My main objection is that those wings are out of scale with the rest of the building. They would have worked much better were the tower 30 or so floors tall.

Frank Gehry's Mangled Buildings

Frank Gehry (b. 1929) is a famous architect who I wouldn't commission to design a doghouse.

Unfortunately, people and organizations having pockets far deeper than mine seem to be thrilled to hire the old fellow to create yet another twisted, smashed-up appearing structure. No accounting for taste, as they've been saying for centuries.

I will grant Gehry one thing. Classical examples of modernist architecture or "International Style" (as the Museum of Modern Art called it in the 1930s), are almost always boring to look at and not human-friendly. Gehry's buildings are far from boring. They are appalling. Also not human-friendly.

My limited experience with Gehry buildings (Los Angeles' Disney, Seattle's EMP -- see images below) is that their interiors are confusingly laid out. The exteriors generally try to hide the fact that these are buildings with some sort of structure that supports them. By visually denying the logic and solidity of a building, they are disorienting, upsetting, denying their proper nature. Which does not mean that I necessarily favor structural clarity über alles -- that was a major defect of International Style.

Gehry, his buildings, and perhaps those who commissioned them, strike me as being sad victims of perpetual adolescence; aging juvenile show-offs, if you will.

Here are some examples of Gehry's work, images found here and there on the Web.

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"Dancing House" - Prague - 1996

Experience Music Project - Seattle - 2000

Peter B. Lewis Building, Case Western Reserve University - Cleveland - 2002

Walt Disney Concert Hall - Los Angeles - 2003

Cleveland Clinic, Lou Rovo Center for Brain Health - Las Vegas - 2010

Dr Chau Chak Wing Building, University of Technology Sydney - 2015

Intriguing Old San Antonio Towers

My wife had never been to Texas. After several years of talking things over, we decided to go there last month to satisfy her curiosity. Texas is a prosperous, fast-growing business-friendly, income tax-free state. Generally a nice place to live, but from my perspective it lacks five-start tourist sites.

Probably the most famous Texas site is the Alamo, where a group of Texans were wiped out in a famous battle against a Mexican army. That's the main building in the foreground, its well-known curved facade top having been added decades after the fight.

But the building that intrigued me was the tall structure in the background. It was completed in 1924 as the Medical Arts Building, but now is the Emily Morgan Hotel, named after a woman (disputedly) associated with the events of 1836. A sketch of the building's history is here.

The street layout dictated a "flatiron" plan, but the architect took advantage of this by placing a tower where the angled sides converge.

Here is a view of the ornamentation at the upper floors.

Not far away, also in the Riverwalk district of downtown San Antonio, is the Tower Life Building. According to the link, it was completed in 1929 as the Smith-Young Tower.

A close-up of ornamentation near the top. The building is unusual in that it has eight sides. It might have been an executives' heaven if it had corner windows (though it probably has eight corner offices per floor).

I have always liked the American skyscrapers built from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s, most of which were in Gothic and Art Deco (or Moderne, in those days) style. The Tower Life Building is no exception. It's a fine example from that era.

Tokyo's Frank Lloyd Wright Imperial Hotel: My Photos

One of famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright's "lost" buildings is his (1923-1967) Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.

Actually, it seems that part of it survives at the Meiji-Mura Museum near Nagoya (see the above link for details). Surviving bits are mostly in the form of exterior stone decorations, lobby furnishings and such because the brick and concrete construction of the original could not be disassembled.

It happened that I was in Japan a few times while serving in the U.S. Army and took some slide photos of the hotel that I recently scanned and digitally adjusted. The images aren't very good, but at least they offer a sense of what the Imperial Hotel was like a few years before it was demolished. Had I known its future, I probably would have taken many more photos to document the building.

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An architectural rendering of the Imperial Hotel. The images below deal with the entrance court area which appears at the right-center of the rendering. It faced out towards the Imperial Palace plaza. The wing in the foreground was along a street leading to the Ginza district and contained shops on its lower level.

Two postcard views of the hotel from around 1932, to judge by the automobiles. These images should serve as orientation to my four photos below.

This shows part of the gardens and a tiny glimpse of the building. It was taken in June of 1964.

Also taken in June, 1964. It shows the pond by the entrance as well as some entrance details. By this time, the stone ornamentation was getting pretty mildewed.

This photo and the next one were taken in March 1964 when I spent a week in Tokyo on temporary duty at the Stars and Stripes newspaper.. The weather was gloomy the day I took these photos. Worse, the film I used was Kodak's Ektachrome, a cheaper alternative to its now-discontinued Kodachrome color film. Seen here is the entrance and reflecting pond. Among the cars shown are a Chevrolet and a Cadillac, Japan having little in the way of domestically built large automobiles in those days.

This photo shows some of the brickwork and decorative detailing.

Lower Manhattan Skyscraper Evolution

Architectural Modernism as a secular religion was somewhere near its peak of influence when I took a yearlong course in architectural design as an undergraduate. It roughly had something to do with "honesty to building materials" along with a shunning of ornamentation. As a result, tall office buildings (and many other structures) looked like products from a Bauhaus/van der Rohe 3-D printer (if you will pardon the anachronistic metaphor).

Time does march on, though architectural styles are more prone to crawling. The present post looks at skyscraper architecture in the form of six office building projectss located in Lower Manhattan. Five of the projects were the tallest in New York City when they were built.

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Singer Building
The Singer Building, 186.57 m (612.1 ft) was completed in 1908, the tallest office building in the world at the time. It was demolished 60 years later, but not before I had plenty of chances to view it. It had an odd shape, being slightly bulged at the top of the tower. Dark red brick cladding (if I remember correctly) coupled with the ornamentation gave it a distinctly old-fashioned appearance. It seems that some architects were still trying to figure out what a skyscraper should look like.

Woolworth Building
Still standing is the Woolworth Building, completed in 1913 and the world's tallest at 241.4 m (792 ft) for 17 years. Gothic cathedrals were vertically oriented, so became a useful inspiration for skyscraper style. The Woolworth Building is dignified, and of-a-piece, unlike the awkward Singer Building. The silhouette of the Singer can be seen near the left of the photo.

40 Wall Street
40 Wall Street, completed 1930, reigned as the world's tallest (at its peak, 927 ft, 283 m) for less than two months, when it was surpassed by the spire atop the Chrysler Building. It has passed through a number of hands and was given several names, starting with Bank of Manhattan Building and currently as the Trump Building. Architecturally, it is a nice composition topped by an attractive pyramidal form. While it's not necessarily my absolute favorite skyscraper design, I think it's the best of the group shown here.

One Chase Manhattan Plaza
One Chase Manhattan Plaza was never a "tallest," (813 ft, 248 m when completed in 1961), but it was massive, disrupting the ensemble of tall, lean towers elsewhere in New York City's financial district. It is in the International Style that was at the height of its influence when it was designed and built. The New York Times image above shows it as a simple slab, chopped off at the top with only a slight transition offered by by cladding over the utility zone. The rest is basically fenestration and some vertical structural accents. I would not shed tears if it suffered the Singer Building's fate.

World Trade Center Twin Towers
This Wikipedia entry covers the World Trade Center Twin Towers destroyed in 2001. The Twin Towers where the tallest in the world at 1,368 ft (417.0 m) when Tower 1 was completed near the end of 1970. Tower 2 was about six feet (two meters) shorter at the roofline. Again, the structures are simple with minimal adornment (mostly near ground level). Not very interesting as a pair, but a single such tower would have been even more sleep-provoking visually. The 1975 New York Daily News image above includes the Woolworth Building towards the left side and 40 Wall at the extreme right.

One World Trade Center
This is the replacement for the twin towers. Not the tallest in the world, but the tallest in the USA at the time of its recent completion (roof: 1,368 ft, 417.0 m) -- the same as Tower 1. Styling is in line with current postmodern practice whereby an office or apartment tower is treated as a kind of sculpture whose interest lies in its overall shape and perhaps its surface texture. This is more interesting than the simple forms seen on the original towers and Chase, but still too sterile for my taste.

Fascist Remnants

I took the photo above in 2006 when visiting the Deutsches Museum in Munich and posted it on the 2Blowhards blog. The aircraft is a World War 2 Me109 fighter, and something is missing. The missing item is the Nazi swastika on the tail. At the time (and today as well, for all I know) part of Germany's de-Nazification required removal or deletion of National Socialist symbolism, and that included historical exhibits such as that Messerschmitt. Yet bookstores in Germany carried books about the Second World War filled with photos of aircraft sporting swastikas -- no airbrushing there.

Italy is different from Germany. And its dictator Benito Mussolini was different from Adolf Hitler. Until Mussolini made the mistake of teaming up with Hitler in the mid-1930s, his regime had little blood on its hands, and he was held in fairly high regard by a number of Great Powers political leaders and print media publications. Even following the war and his execution, his family thrived: son Romano was a noted jazz musician who married Sophia Loren's sister, and Romano's daughter Alessandra has been successful in Italian politics.

And so it is that, unlike swastikas in Germany, fasces (the symbol of Fascist Italy) can be found here and there along with essentially unaltered buildings from that era. Actually, the 1930s was a time of transition in architectural fashion towards pure International Style (a New York Museum of Modern Art term of the day). That transition was done in stages, ornament being slowly discarded. Government building tended to retain simplified hints of classical architecture, as can be seen in the United States as well as Italy and elsewhere.

Below are images from my recent visit to Sicily and southern Italy. I didn't research the dates the buildings were built, but I'm pretty sure most date to Fascist times.

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Poste e Telegrafi, Palermo

Poste e Telegrafi, Matera

Banco di Napoli, Matera

Banco di Sicilia, Palermo

Manhole covers in Ostuni with the Fascist symbol

I was surprised to find this bust of Mussolini in a souvenir shop in the Sicilian resort town of Taormina, but there it was along with statuettes with religious and other themes. I bought this small one so that I could show it on this blog. There were larger size busts as well as a full-figure statuette of Mussolini with his right arm raised in the fascist salute. More than one shop had these items, and apparently no one seemed to mind that they were on display.

Architectural Archetypes, Side-by-Side

Well, "archetypes" might be putting it a bit strongly, but blog titles do require brevity. Here are two buildings, one characteristic of the 1930s, the other an example of a 1950s-60s fad.

I took the above photo in January of this year while visiting Reno, Nevada. The white building to the left is the former downtown Reno post office, built in the early 1930s and currently being renovated (background links are here -- does not mention the closing -- and here). On the right is the Pioneer Center for the Performing Arts. Its roof is a geodesic dome, but in plan view it's a pentagon whose sides bulge out as if inflated.

Some people consider the post office building an example of Art Deco style. While it does feature some Art Deco decoration, I'm inclined to place it in the category of abstracted, stripped-down classical architecture often seen in government and other buildings of the 1930s in Germany, Italy, and the United States as well as elsewhere. Visually, such buildings aren't as entertaining as those of High Art Deco style, but I find them better than the designs that appeared after World War 2.

Now let's consider the juxtaposition shown above. In downtown areas of relatively unplanned American cities, you usually can see a jumble of architectural styles including interesting contrasts such as in Reno. This can be good or bad, depending on the styles. Jumbles can satisfy libertarian philosophy or might well appear as an ugly mess. Uniformity can be totalitarian (to introduce another political metaphor) or a means of protection against something stylistically worse. Below are some examples of uniformity.

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Modernist architect Le Corbusier came up with a massive urban renewal scheme for Paris known as Plan Voisin. A 1925 model is shown here. At the lower right is the River Seine and the Ile de la Cité, which provides orientation. Corbu's plan would have taken out a large swath of streets and structures north of the river and replaced that with a uniform set of high-rise structures. Lower buildings would be placed close to the Seine. At the lower left of the image we see that arcaded rue de Rivoli structures across the street from the Louvre would also have modernist replacements. To me, this would have been capital-T Totalitarian.

And what about the geodesic dome, an object of much praise in certain quarters. For the most part, they are simply scattered here and there. But there is at least one concentration of them, something in Cornwall, England called The Eden Project, shown above. For what it's worth, I consider it ghastly.

Here is a contrasting, traditional small community, the town of Ivoire on the French bank of Lake Geneva. Its buildings are not a uniform design, but share a similar range of building materials and spirit. Très charmant, say I.

Harvey Wiley Corbett Style Cities of Tomorrow

Architect Harvey Wiley Corbett (1873-1954) didn't invent the concept of multi-level separation of vehicle and pedestrian traffic, but he did much to popularize the concept in the early decades of the twentieth century. His Wikipedia entry is here, and a discussion of his city planning ideas is here.

The idea of separating rail, street vehicle and pedestrian traffic has both rational and idealistic appeal, and the twentieth century up to around 1940 was a time when bold concepts of the future were entertained and even given serious consideration. Offhand, I can't think of any actual large-scale implementation of those ideas, because the cost and scale would have been immense. A small-scale implementation was in the General Motors pavilion at the 1939-40 New York Worlds Fair (the link has a photo).

Logic and idealism aside, I find it hard to image a real-world city of that kind. I'm not sure that drivers would have enjoyed being channeled between stark building walls or, in some cases, roaring along hundreds of feet above ground level. And pedestrians would be breathing exhaust fumes rising from all those cars, trucks and busses running below.

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La Rue Future - Eugène Hénard - 1910
A French concept of multi-level traffic.

King's View - 1911
This is a well-known early example of a utopian future New York City.

City of future by Corbett - 1913
Internet sources say this drawing was based on Corbett's thinking, but I can't confirm that he was at it as early as 1913.

Corbett for Regional Plan Association - Hugh Ferriss, delineator - 1923-24
This is a modest version of a multi-level traffic city.

Corbett for Popular Science Monthly - Frank R. Paul, delineator - 1925
Here Corbett proposes a city with everything packed into skyscrapers including schools, playgrounds and (scary thought!) airfields.

Concept by Francisco Mujica - 1929-30
A future city in the Corbett idiom.

From "The Metropolis of Tomorrow" by Hugh Ferriss
This image shows traffic pulsing along some 30 or 40 floors above ground level. What always intrigued me about this rendering is the party taking place on the terrace of the building to the right.

Here Ferriss shows multiple raised roadways along with a Corbett-style pedestrian level near the ground.  Those airplanes cruising between the skyscrapers make me nervous, but apparently didn't bother Ferriss.

No high-level trafficways here. Pretty much standard Corbett in this Ferriss drawing.