Another Brick Lane

(Rue de Pontoise, 75005)
After declaring my love for brick on this blog, like an obsessed suitor I've now started to see it popping up all over the city. Along the Rue de Chateaudun a red chimney stack spine running up through the grey stone side of a building. Opposite, in a structure being rehabilitated, flashes of brick nudity on partially undressed walls. Walking aong one street though, I discover a fascinating trio of brick constructions which reveal much about the history of the material in Paris.

The Rue de Pontoise in Paris runs down to the Seine across the Boulevard St Germain from just adjacent to the Mutualite building. A rather insignificant street, it nevertheless offers several points of interest. The most well known structure in this passage is the Piscine Pontoise, a swimming pool designed by the architect Lucien Pollet in 1933. Whilst the brick façade is of a rather standard design, it is inside that the architect hid the jewells. Art deco tiling runs throughout the building, but what catches the eye most are the two balconies surrounding the pool, each offering individual changing units. This unusual structure gave a melancholic and slightly threatening backdrop to Kieslowski’s film "Bleu".

Behind the Piscine Pontoise you can just catch glimpses of the newly renovated Collège des Bernardins, a medieval monastry and centre of learning. The spotlessly new terracotta tiles on the roof of this building give an attractive background to the Piscine, but what really catches my eye is this magnificent brick chimney, stretching up to catch the last rays of afternoon sun.

Either side of the piscine are two more fascinating structures. On the corner of the Rue de Pontoise and the Boulevard St Germain, a building cut away from its bretheren and left to stand and guard this spot alone (see photo at the beginning of the post). From this angle, it gives a very curious perspective, appearing almost knife thin, but what interests me most is how it displays parts of the construction that were originally designed to be hidden away. Behind the classic Haussmannian façade we can now see the rear of the building and the rather shameful brick wall and bathroom windows. I’m not sure what would have originally hidden this view, but it feels almost voyeuristic to observe it today.

Flanking the piscine on the other side, a more typical later use of brick, but this time in a most unusual design. From the early decades of the 20th century, brick was the material of choice for municipal buildings, and many schools appeared sporting this element. Typically, these structures were in art deco or more modernist forms, but the school in the Rue de Pontoise is in a decorative, italianate form. The building features many elements typical of this style, such as projecting, over-hanging eaves and arch-headed windows. Even the brickwork is more ornamental than is usual, incorporating a fresque, and a wide selection of coloured bricks, ranging from deep blues to delicate pinks. It is further evidence if evidence is needed of just how flexible and multi-functional this material is.

Note:
If you are interested in brick and find yourself in this area, two other structures should be of interest. Firstly, a fantastic and imposing ‘ilot’ building behind the Maubert Mutualité market on the Boulevard St Germain. Secondly, further along the Boulevard Saint-Germain at number 57, the Ecole Supérieure des Travaux Publics.

The Day the Music Died

(Jussieu Music, 75005)
A long, long time ago the playing of music was based on the revolutions of a disc, but the children of the digital revolution have brought this cycle to an end. The world of music has always been a helter-skelter of cyclical fashions, but the changes today are so radical that we are still not sure what the musical landscape will look like when we get to the bottom. In the city, the first victims of this revolution have clearly been the independent music retailers. Walking along Rue Linné I see bad news on the doorstep - Jussieu music has closed. I can't remember if I cried, but something touched me deep inside.

Being a child of small town suburbia, I grew up thinking that choice was what the major chainstores could provide. Their stock could satisfy my teenage kicks whilst my musical tastes remained mainstream, but when my choices moved more leftfield and I began looking away from current fashions towards the back catalogues, and I began to see that I was lost in the High Street.

Fortunately, around this time I moved to Paris and I discovered a world of small, independent retailers. Each shop had its specialties and idiosyncrasies but all stocked huge ranges of discs, both new and second hand and sometimes more excitingly, dirt cheap pre-release discs sold on to them by music industry insiders. The golden triangle for an afternoon of browsing was Gibert Jeune, Crocodisc, and best of all, Jussieu music. I rarely went to these shops with specific ideas for purchases in mind, but instead flicked through the rows, boxes and shelves of discs, picking out things that interested me, hunting for elusive 69 Franc bargains. It was only rock and roll, but I liked it.

How quickly our youth and young manhood disappears! Today music is streamed in bits and bytes. Slash and burn then return, listen to those notes churn. Do we know what true music sounds like anymore? Files are shared, but music is stuck in individual pods. We've entered a world where quality is less important than the number of titles we can carry around with us, and how easily we can skip and shuffle. Do we still believe that music can save our mortal soul? Here we are all in one place, a generation lost in My Space.

Back to Rue Linné, and the sad sight of the four shops of the Jussieu music empire with the shutters down. What a waste! Once four proud horsemen, now a true apocalypse. It's the end of this world as we know it, and I don't really feel fine. It's coming like a ghost town, all the music shops have been closed down.

It now seems such a long, long time ago, but I'll always remember the good old days when the music played, and how that music used to make me smile. Now it's all so quiet.

Note:
Thanks to Tim for suggesting the subject. Now see if you can earn yourself more points by finding all the songs in the post!

A Question of Perspective

Walking around Paris, it is easy to consider yourself as a kind of time-traveller. If you use your imagination just a little and block out the most ostentatious elements of the 20th and 21st centuries, you can almost believe that you are experiencing exactly the same city as inhabitants from hundreds of years ago. But how do we know exactly how our ancestors saw and experienced the city? Standing on the Parvis of Notre Dame today, we may have the impression that we are stepping in the footprints of visitors from centuries ago, seeing the same things that they observed, but here we would be very much mistaken.

In 1865, the Baron Haussmann completely recreated the parvis and other areas surrounding Notre Dame, tearing down all the medieval buildings that blocked a broad perspective of the Cathedral. The radical changes imposed by Haussmann have always proved controversial, perhaps nowhere more so than here. As the situationist Guy Debord wrote, “..from any standpoint other than that of facilitating police control, Haussmann’s Paris is a city built by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. Interestingly for the situationists, Haussmann also built a new police headquarters and law courts on the Ile de la Cité, making it in many ways represent the controversial trinity of the law, the state and religion.

It is the parvis though which has altered our perception of this historic monument. Called a “lake of asphalt” by the French historian Jacques Hillairet, he also notes that the current day parvis is six times bigger today than it was in the middle ages. Hillairet continues, exclaiming that Notre Dame “was originally constructed in order to be seen from the foot of its towers and not from the end of the present empty space. This view minimizes it”. If we look at Google maps, and compare Notre Dame with two other famous cathedrals in France, we see just how radical Haussmann’s renovations were.

In the first picture, we see that the parvis at Notre Dame is at least as long as the church itself. At Reims in the second picture, the parvis is an insignificant oblong form. Finally, at Strasbourg, the imposing gothic cathedral has almost no parvis at all, instead being tightly surrounded on three sides by other buildings.

Was the intention of Haussmann purely one of perspective? In fact, the previous perspective of the cathedral had long since stopped impressing the Parisians. The church had fallen out of popularity at the end of the middle-ages, and was already in a state of severe disrepair when the French Revolution occurred. With the old order temporarily defeated, Notre Dame narrowly avoided being demolished altogether when it was sold off, until further political revolutions finally stopped this from happening. The new revolutionary order did though pull down all the statues carved into the outside of the church and sell off many of its treasures.

Finally, it was Victor Hugo who did much to bring the edifice back into the hearts of the public following the publication of his famous story, Notre Dame de Paris. Haussmann then delivered perhaps what the public of the day wanted, and probably what many tourists today appreciate. When these tourists line up at the end of the Parvis, or the Pont St Michel to take photos though perhaps they are not aware that they are actually photographing history from a very modern perspective.

Further Information:
Following Alain's very interesting comment, I looked again on Google and found the markings he refers to. On this picture below, you can see a narrow road leading up to the church, and just how close to the church the original buildings were. The map beneath dating from the beginning of the 17th Century indicates that the street was called aptly enough, Rue Notre Dame. The map also seems to suggest that the original Hotel Dieu (hospital) was situated on the other side of the parvis, alongside the river.

The City Sole Healers

Whilst Paris has largely managed to avoid the worldwide slide of cities towards an inter-changeable identikit identity, it remains a city, and necessarily shares some aspects of life that have evolved in these large communities. Cities are machines that function in mostly the same universal manner, housing certain trades that are entirely suited to the lives and needs of the inhabitants. Stop almost any person moving around a metropole and you’ll find they have two objects in common; a set of keys and a pair of shoes.

With this in mind, walk around almost any city and you may begin to notice two things. Firstly, shoe repairers are also specialists in key cutting, and secondly almost all of these shops seem to date back to at least the 1960s. Whilst most places in a city are involved in a constant struggle to adapt and keep up with fashions, the simple shoe repairer has quietly gone about his business. Why think about fashion when fashion does not exist in this trade?

A shoe or a key is a simple, universal object that has not changed to any great extent in centuries. Although we may now speak of biometric security, keys are still the keepers of the city door, and they still look much like they did in the middle ages. Our feet may be dressed today in more sporty models than in the past, but they are still functional items that have the same attributes as their ancestors - a heel, a sole, insoles and laces. When a lock changes or a heel breaks, we do not care about finding a modern, attractive store for our need, but someone who can offer us a quick service at a reasonable price.

Around Paris, I find shops that seemingly cornered the local market in the 50s and 60s and have kept their position in the community ever since. Where individuals may have retired, others have taken over the business and have seen no reason to renovate a fully-functional store. What would be the point when the machinery is still operating and a steady stream of people continues to use the service?

In many ways it is the ideal city business. Initial investment in tools and materials is low, and the shop can be set up in the smallest, low-rent units. It can be a one-person occupation with limited need for additional staff, and offers a steady stream of income with no need for continual occupational training. Storekeepers can keep stock for almost indefinite periods, and offer a service that people will never be able to reproduce in their own homes. For these reasons, it has often been a service provided by immigrants into a city, although with saturation levels reached many years ago in Paris, it is only through the purchase of existing units that the recent arrival can set up shop today.

What may be unique to Paris is the fact that no chain store franchising system is involved. These are individual businesses with a unique story attached to each shop, but what they share is their physical appearance. Whilst most of the street facades present a kind of faceless modernism, here are tiny throwbacks to what the city looked like 40 or 50 years ago. Typical shop logos and font types are constantly and imperceptibly altered, but these city survivors offer us a trip back through the history of post-war design as well as their more traditional, valuable service!

…and the Baron Brick (Part 2)

(Ctd from Part 1)

There is something intrinsically comforting about the impeccably designed, immensely tactile brick. Thousands of years of experience have made them hand-sized, enabling a builder to grasp one in one hand and still have another hand free to apply the trowel of cement. The metallic scrape of the trowel on the brick’s surface, then the chink of one brick being placed on top of another is an urban symphony. In the hand they offer a satisfying, not too heavy weight, a scratchy roughness and a warm smell of burnt-pink dustiness. They are one of man’s ultimate creations, so much so that today they look and feel like an extension of nature.

Walking forward in time along the Rue de la Tour des Dames towards the Trinité church, my heart leaps as I see two brick buildings. At Number 11, a 19th century house, and sitting opposite at Number 16, pure 20th century industrial. The house is a different creature to the ladies at the top of the street, but this is not to say that the building is free from adornment. The Flemish-style gables and cream trimmings set against the carnelian brick red make this a most handsome structure. Across the street, a gutted electricity building caught on the cusp of art-deco and modernist. Constructed in several materials, it uses brick as decoration, perhaps to present a kind of working-class solidarity, or perhaps just to mirror the house opposite. These were buildings designed for a purpose; one to provide electricity, and one as a machine for living in.

Like their sisters at the top of the street, neither of these buildings functions today according to the original intended purpose. Number 16 was recently ceded by the EDF electricity company to the city of Paris, and is currently home to an information centre on renewable energy forms, but is earmarked for further development, possibly into a sports centre. Number 11, with its more classical forms, has become offices.

As these buildings prove, brick is eminently adaptable, but they are also pointers to the troubled history the material has had in France and Paris. Originally brought into the country by the Romans, brick was largely forgotten again until the 14th century, but then rose again to ultimately reach a pinnacle in the 17th century, most notably at the Place des Vosges. Since this period, brick has made sporadic appearances, but has largely been supplanted by the abundant natural stone to be found in the country. Paris itself is built on top of cavernous stone quarries which have provided much of the sandy white stone seen on the buildings in the city today.

In the 19th century brick was still frequently used as a building material, but almost always covered over with a plaster cladding. This house in the Rue de la Tour des Dames is therefore a true rarity, proudly baring its red skeleton to the world.

The early decades of the 20th century saw brick make a grand comeback in the city, but almost entirely on municipal buildings, particularly the swathes of social HBM housing around the edges of the city. In these more recent times though, brick has suffered on two fronts. Whilst it has largely been snubbed as a material by the rich since the 17th century, it also became deeply unfashionable in modernist circles. In the United Kingdom where brick has always reigned supreme, it became a class issue; being a material for the masses it was too lowly for the wealthy. It even became a 20th Century insult, with the term ‘Red-brick Universities’ given to the more modern schools, belittling them in comparison to the classical stone of Oxford and Cambridge.

Post-war, the modernists also rejected brick, believing it to be old-fashioned, and a symbol of traditional and pre-industrial technology. The modernists advocated the revolutionary new materials of glass, steel, and concrete, and when brick walls could not be avoided, they were rendered neutral with a coat of plaster or concrete cladding.

Today it is often considered an impractical material, certainly for the larger scale structures that are likely to appear in a city. It became easier to build higher and more quickly with the more modern materials, so much so that it lead the architect Louis Kahn to ask the famous question “what do you want brick?”. Kahn believed that brick would answer “I Like an arch”, meaning that it is flexible, wants to be seen, and can be decorative. Its simplicity, reasonable cost and solidity make it still practical, but perhaps it is through its aesthetic that it still makes its best case. Looking at these buildings in front of me, I can’t help but wonder if concrete and glass really are the answer to all today’s construction conundrums.

Further Information:
If anybody can give me any more information about the building at Number 11 I’d be very interested!

For examples of how flexible brick can be in construction, click here.

For more information on a very interesting book on the subject of brick in Paris, click here.