Which came first, the city or the street? Mass or void? Where did the form of Paris come from? This is not a city of buildings set in a grid, but a canyon city of built walls. The figure is the space, the ground what is built. //
I have always been melancholic for this time I haven’t known in which the great masters of architecture had only rarely been trained in architecture studies : silversmith, carpenter, stone cutter… Architecture at that time was not about practice or discipline, but about the transmission about almost what was an artisan’s knowledge.
I had always thought that in Paris, since architecture studies had left the beaux arts, and then had been unfortunately forced into the undergraduate/graduate (licence/master in french, that is only 5 years) system, we had lost the passion and the ardor, that pushed to come not only students that hesitated with law school but came here because it sounded fun, but the Vocation with capital V.
My experience as an exchange architecture student for a year at Georgia Tech made me moderate my judgment a little bit. //
With Halloween rapidly approaching and nary a candy corn in sight here, my mind turns to nostalgic Halloweens and the Haunted Houses I used to visit and help with. Although I always enjoyed my parts in the Haunted Houses, being Crazed Gorilla in a Cage #1 or even Mad Scientist # 2 (and one year Chainsaw Maniac # 4!), looking back the houses/mazes themselves were not too interesting architecturally . The fear and terrifying aspects were merely ornamentation applied to a dull arrangement of walls – the decorated shed of horror as it were. Severed limbs, gallons of blood, and enough fake spider webs to house every eight-legged creature in this hemisphere are the Doric columns and gildings of the season. An interesting question then is what would be an architectural horror?
An Urban Canvas
So this is my first post since I began a once in a lifetime francophone journey this summer that will ultimately take the better part of a year to complete. I have been in Paris for 5 weeks now and have been acclimating myself to a familiar but ultimately unique understanding of the role and function of the city and the interactions of its inhabitants. My first thoughts: art on the urban canvas.
We are the last class to experience the Paris Program!?! As a senior architecture student participating in the Paris Program, I never imagined I’d have to think about, let alone put such a thought into writing. //
