Post Modernism

When looking at the city, I try to avoid thinking of it in terms of before and after. I prefer to concentrate on what is left standing and focus on the walls that have managed to survive the demolition teams. Sometimes though, digging around a building will turn me into an archeologist, and I'll begin to find notes and traces of a site's previous existence. When two such sites involve current incarnations as post offices, I begin thinking that I should dig deeper still.

Oscar Wilde said that "fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months". Whilst architecture may have a longer life-span than this, it is clear that it is subject to the same rules as other spheres of society. The corner of the Rue de Provence and the Rue Chauchat today houses a rather attractive Post Office building, decorative in a faintly Art Deco manner. It retains original signage, and even doorways that today lead nowhere. Little though would lead you to believe that you are standing at a point in the city where a fashion was created.

This Post Office building replaced a previous structure which housed a furniture showroom and gallery run by an American named Samuel Bing. The name of this shop? "L'Art Nouveau". Bing opened his showroom in 1895, selling objects reflecting this new style, but the only trace remaining of this era is the name he gave to the budding movement. The building was rented, meaning that he could not make changes to the external decor, but in any case, within 15 years the movement had blown itself out. I'm inclined to agree with the critic Jonathan Glancey who stated that it was a style "better suited to interior decor and illustrations rather than architecture", and the building that stands there today has sufficient merits of its own to justify its place.

In the Rue de Douai, a brisk 10 minute walk away, another Post Office building but a radically different style from another era. This bureau occupies the ground floor of a curious 1970s office building, sitting beneath rows of individual office units at counterpoints.

I find the building neither attractive or ugly, but rather an interesting attempt to break up the linear restrictions of the Paris streetscape. In such a historic area as this though (just south of the Place de Clichy), the chances were that this would be a concrete footprint on top of the skeleton of some dead fashion. It was a surprise though to learn that it replaced one of the most attractive and historic cinemas in the city, "L'Artistic", a place that showed the premières of both Eisenstein's 'Battleship Potemkin' in 1926 and Jean Vigo's 'Zero de Conduite' in 1933.

As was the case with the Gaumont Palace nearby, the rise in the influence of television and other forms of leisure made the sheer number of cinemas in Paris unsustainable. There were inevitably victims such as "L'Artistic" that should perhaps have been protected, but this was not an era that favoured protection of the old. Today, my regret is that I never got to see the fantastic interiors of this building, a disappointment made all the more bitter when I have to suffer the crushing banality of the inside of a Post Office.

For how much longer though will the Post Office hold its position in the streetscape? Throughout Paris, large structures remain, a throwback to the days when as the PTT they housed both telecommunications infrastructures as well as the standard postal services. Today, the buildings dwarf the downsized structures contained within, and with technology leading us further and further away from the centralised distribution of paper, it may not be too long before these buildings go the way of architectural modes and decorative cinemas.

Postboxes

Last week saw a general strike at La Poste with up to one in four of all postmen and women in France stopping work and marching against the possibility of a partial or complete privatisation of the service. Strikes are nothing new in France of course, but what interests me in this case is how the postal service worldwide is changing and what possible effect it may have on our cityscapes in the future.

Recently, I was with a colleague who wanted to post some letters. We'd been out for an hour at lunchtime, and it wasn't until we'd arrived back at the office that we found a postbox - just 10 metres from the front entrance of our office. French letterboxes are bright yellow, and although they are far smaller than the traditional English red pillarbox, they should in theory still be very noticeable in the street. However, perhaps because of some similar effect to the luminous clothing theory I mentioned before, or perhaps because we simply don't post letters anymore, they seem to have become invisible. There could be a letterbox every 50 metres, or they may all have been removed from Paris overnight and I wouldn't notice either way.

Whilst La Poste is obviously still an ongoing concern as a financial institution (it provides banking services for people who would not be able to open an account in a standard high street bank), and as a delivery of parcels and other non-standard communication, how many people today take the time to write a letter by hand, address an envelope, lick a stamp, paste it on the envelope then put the envelope into a postbox? And if postboxes are now so infrequently used, will they begin to disappear, and if they do, will we notice? Close to my office again I recently saw a phone box being dug out of the ground, lifted onto a truck and taken away. If I hadn't witnessed the event, I would never have known that the phone box had existed.

Further Information

I found a report produced by the Senate in France explaining the evolution of the service. It outlines how the actual postal and delivery service has been slowly declining, but also that it in fact only represents around 5% of the activity of La Poste.

To counter that report slightly, here's an interview with France's most famous postman, Olivier Besancenot.