(left to right, top to bottom)
(left to right, top to bottom)
(left to right, top to bottom)
(left to right, top to bottom)
(left to right, top to bottom)
I didn't have any set expectations wrt/ what kind of bikes would Bruxellians and Parisians use, but I was still surprised. We're far here from Montreal's cult of the fixed-gear, and abundance of 30-years old cute Peugeot road bikes. Most rides there were absolutely unremarkable town bikes clearly meant to a very utilitarian life of slow and careful riding. Here's a sampling of the bikes I did find interesting.
(left to right, top to bottom)
(left to right, top to bottom)
(left to right, top to bottom)
The 1958 Brussels World's Fair was the post-war resurrection of this old Victorian european tradition, the International Expo, where every civilized country comes down to one european city to show off what they're up to.
The content was full of your typical post-war technocratic poptimism: a giant sculpture of a iron atom. A building, commissioned by petrochemical giant Phillips, hosting a Musique Concrete piece created by Techno Music progenitor Edgar Varese. The soviets brought over a Sputnik replica, some Lada cars, a model of the first nuclear icebreaker, the Lenin. The yankees showed off an electronic computer: austria had an alleged scale model of a nuclear fusion reactor.
What the host country, Belgium, wanted to show off, however, was its efforts civilizing the Belgian Congo. So they did the logical thing and invited some 700 urbanized Congolese people to be displayed in a "human zoo", wearing traditional garbs, along with some fake "primitive African" art created by white Belgians.
In mid-july, the Congolese members of the exhibition protested and demanded to be sent back home, and the exhibition was promptly shut down, going down in infamy as the 20th century's most notorious exhibition of human colonial subjects.
Above, left to right top to bottom: the Atomium, a giant representation of an iron crystal, seen over national snack, a cone of fries: RockGrowth by Arik Levy: the Centennial Palace, build for the 1935 Expo, which took place on the same site
Built between 1866 and 1883 to centralize the judicial system, the Brussels courthouse is rumoured to be the largest building built in the 19th century.
With the building no longer being appropriate for a modern judiciary, court functions started to move out to other modern buildings, during the 80's, causing problems in terms of funding and upkeep. An overhaul effort started in 1984, but with funding being hard to come by for a building that is emptying itself of its actual function, the effort is perpetually stalled, and the 80's scaffolding is still up to this day, and itself had to be overhauled in 2004. Recent news indicate 2030 as a target deadline for the end of the work on the outside facades, with the interior work continuing after that.
In 2001, a spectacular public elevator is built in order to better connect the tramway station on Place Poelaert with Places des Marolles and the buses on Rue Haute. Suffering from chronic reliability problems, the two elevators are due for overhaul in 2021.
(where my friend studies /humblebrag)
(left to right, top to bottom)
(top to bottom, left to right)
Every since I was a 10 years old nerd I wanted to ride the Train a Grande Vitesse. Well I did it. (well technically I didn't, since the TGV proper only operates in France: this is the Thalys, a joint venture between the French, Belgian and German national train operators. Same train technology as the original TGV, so did it!)
(top to bottom, left to right)
The Paris Metro is at the midpoint of the Montreal and NYC subways on many aspects. It has the massive scale and complexity of NYC, but like MTL, its lines don't branch (...almost). Like NYC, it has a ruthlessly efficient approach to architecture and, how shall we say, user exprience design: both systems' walls are covered with public bathroom looking white tile, unlike Montreal's flourish of modern and postmodern design alternating with sheer 60's brutalism. NYC and Paris were both started well before the Age of Concrete: most of Paris' masonry is old school, with some unreinforced cement. NYC is visibly, proudly made of steel
NYC is really uncanny, it looks like it's a city underneath the city, with very wide quays that sometimes have several tracks running in between, or several quays serving several pairs of tracks all side by side, but then real estate is always kept as a premium, with every square foot of track or passenger boarding area being worth millions of dollars in productivity for the center of the world's banking system. This is partly because of NYC's cut-and-cover techniques, which means that anything underground can take just about as much place underground as it needs as long as it stays away from the skyscraper's froundations, and this same trench technique is what gives Montreal its cavernous, immense, monumental sprawling stations. The Paris metro on the other hand was mostly build with compressed air jackhammers, so everything is tight, barely large enough to fit the trains. Like NYC, Paris' underground has nothing to do with normal natural soil, so while the construction crews of the Paris metro in the wee hours of the 20th century weren't dealing with millenia of priceless archeological findings, they sometimes had to build bridges underground over empty gypsum quarries.
Like the Montreal metro, and very much unlike the NYC subway, the Paris métro goes hard.
NYC, with its decrepit signaling, has an infuriating pattern of movement where a human operator must guesstimate what speed they must go to catch the next light as it turns green. In Montreal and Paris, when the train leaves the station, the semi-automated train bolts out of the station at a rate not very far from the maximum acceleration rate that the designers of the network deemed acceptable for passenger comfort, then maintains a stable crusing speed, then decelerates at the same maximal comfortable rate until a precise stop at the station.
This is a bit unfair to NYC because they need, or chose to, run their lines with many many branches and some several downtown "trunk" trains serving many many otherwise separate lines: this makes this kind of semi-automation semi-impossible. But it still makes NYC feel haphazard and unprofessional. Judging by their reaction to plaster the network with badly calibrated speed trips with trigger tolerances varying by 10mph, it might be fair to say they're unprofessional.
(top to bottom, left to right)
(top to bottom, left to right)
Famously cute neighbourhood of Montmartre
(top to bottom, left to right)
(top to bottom, left to right)
(top to bottom, left to right)
(top to bottom, left to right)
The tall slim tower is the smokestack for a central steam heating system. It's the home a couple of peregrine falcons. At 130 meters, it's 30m taller than the legal maximum height of the rest of the development, making it the dominant part of the skyline from just about any angle.
This is the Front-de-Seine, an area shortly downriver from Tour Eiffel. Used to be an industrial neighbourhood, with the most famous factories being the Javel chlorine water plant, and a Citroen auto, and, during WWII, armament, plant. The demolition of the last factory in 1951 opens up a vast tract of urban real estate for redevelopment. The concept chosen is a post-war theory that I will hereby translate as slab urbanism. The concept, inspired by Le Corbusier's Athens Charter, is to separate the ground level in 3: an underground for public transit and commercial supply, a ground 0 for private automobiles, and an elevated slab for pedestrians only. Or, as Le Corbusier put it, live, work, circulate. For the towers themselves, an architectural concept is promoted called the wasp waist: the first few ab ove-ground floors of every building would be as narrow as possible in order to free up ground space and visual airyness before growing back to normal width above. Take a look at this schematic of how it was originally planned.
Pictured above: old HQ of Soft.Computing, a data marketing company, and Tour Totem, a 31 storey, 207 units apparment tower, and a good example of glass-curtain Brutalist architecture.
As most heavy top-down urbanism models, this theory results in clinically cold areas that simply don't feel like places meant for humans, but I have to admit that it feels a lot better than the US equivalent of broad boulevards with speeding cars. The lack of almost any street-level restaurants and street life makes the place dead empty outside office hours, except for groups of teenagers playing hacky or dribbling soccer balls on the naked concrete after school. Also please enjoy this Chemical Brothers, Michel Gondry music video shot in the neighbourhood: https://youtu.be/LO2RPDZkY88
Pictured above: various pictures of a really neat low-slung building that I believe was an old nightclub, near the base of Tour Avant-Seine, a 32 storey, 132 units appartment and condo tower. I can't find what the night club actually is but judging by the gmaps it's either being demolished or under heavy renovation.
Today, the slab context is critized for being disconnected from the neighbourhood, the integrated shopping mall is in a death spiral, and structural issues are starting to crop up in the slab itself. The structural renovation is going to include some quality-of-life improvements that are still being discussed.
Maison du Brézil is part of a network of student housing situated in the 14th borough of Paris. Founded in 1959 and designed by Le Corbusier, it stands as one of the icons of Brutalist architecture
The story of this park goes all the way back to 1802 when Napoléon ordered the construction of the Canal St-Martin complex in order to supply the city with fresh water from the river Ourcq farther east, and bypass the downtown paris loop of the Seine. It was funded via a tax on wine. Then, in 1876, Napoléon III ordered the consturction of a slaughterhouse complex on the site, which is at the intersection of the canals of Ourcq, St-Denis, and St-Martin. The slaughterhouses were demolished in 1974, and a plan to develop a large urban park was given to architect Bernard Tschumi, who designed a plan inspired by Deconstructivism, and with the help of post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Pictured above is the Science and Industry museum, built in 1987, in a 3-storey deep depression relative to the surrounding ground, surrounded by a moat, doing its best impression of a scifi evil mastermind secret base.
The UFO above left is the infamouse Paris Philarmonique. The site had been the slaughterhouse's train station, which was demolished in 1977. In 2002, president Jacques Chirac announced that a classical music venue would be built on the site. The project was shelved until 2005 to wait for the opening of the nearby Cité de la Musique, a complex including a music museum and other related facilities. The budget is given at 110 million euro, and the entries for the design competition are received in 2006. The design of starchitect Jean Nouvel is accepted, and stuff starts to spin out of control immediately as the two bidding contractors quote the project at 306 and 360 million euros, respectively. For some reason the project is not modified or cancelled.
After a couple years of delays and an actual final price tag of 534 million euro, and cost cutting in the area of cladding, the building is innaugurated, one week after the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Architect Jean Nouvel, angry at the cost cutting and considering the building unfinished due to the cladding not being as smooth as what he envisioned, boycotts the ceremony. He would later go on a media tour complaining that the government was blaming him for the cost overruns, while he himself claimed that 1) the original budget envelope was purposely underestimated to get it passed by the politicians and 2) the cost overruns after his designs were accepted were related to factors outside of his control. In 2019, the Philharmonie would sue his design bureau for 170 million euros as reparations for the cost overruns. The case is still pending
On the right, an american fast food chain restaurant on the ground floor of a mid-rise appartment building on the Villette park complex, in the trademark Deconstructivist style, with the science museum in the background
One of the most iconic Brutalist building complexes.
Oddly enough, it's almost impossible to get historical info on this area. From what I found, it is situated on what used to be a park slash low-density residential area named îlot Riquet. The area was considered obsolete, and the decision to demolish and redevelop was taken in 1962. The towers were built over years 1970 to 1980.
The project was designed by postmodernist german architect Martin Schultz van Treck, who, according to the wikipedia, was "more interested in the shape of space than the architectural object, would use a visualization tool, that he created himself, called the relatoscope". What this means in practice, from what I understand, is that he is frustrated by the impossibility of representing the human scale and context using scale models. The device he invented to remedy this consists of a scale model, a medial endoscope, a CCTV camera, and a TV. Members of the public would be able to move the endoscope end around and inside the buildings and watch the in-context building on the TV.
In the 1994 cult movie Le Péril Jeune, a character looks over the neighbourhood and towers and remarks, "It's funny, when I feel sad, I think it's ugly, but when I'm fine I think it looks super great"
From the bridge crossing the Seine to connect Neuilly-sur-Seine and Courbevoie, La Défense looks cyberpunk, without a trace of the thick mattress of townhouses that covers nearly all of Paris' surface: it looks like solid wall of modernist high-rises. This is partly due to Paris' stringent protection of its heritage architecture, which makes large scale development way hard. Another factor is the reckless abandon with which Tour Montparnasse was built, causing an architectural backlash that Paris haven't seen since Tour Eiffel went up.
The 4 towers of the Damiers complex opened between 1976 and 1978, built then owned by the Union des Assurances de Paris, a state-owned insurance conglomerate Frankensteined together in 1968 via the merger of the three biggest insurance companies in France, which had been taken over by the French government in 1946. After a whirlwind of diversification, consolitation, reorganization, loss of business and offices due to the Indo-Chine war, the nationalization of life insurance in Egypt, and the crippling inefficiency and duplication that the various parts of the state-owned conglomerate would suffer from, the company would become the best known and biggest non-life insurance company in france until its privatization in 1996. The beloved brand would be wiped off the face of France when it got bought slash merged into France-based international superbehemoth Axa in '97, which discontinued the branding in '98.
At some point during this ill-documented hullaballoo, the Damiers complex and the division that owned it and several other social housing, was sold to Logis-Transport, the the housing branch of state-owned public transit company Régie Autonome des Transports Parisiens, branch which was created in '59 with the mission of providing housing to the very numerous employees of the public transit Régie.
Motivated by the same societal and aesthetic ideals as St-Louis' Pruitt-Igoe and London's Trellick Tower, it went farther by using a bleachers-like pattern to offer better patios and more sunlight to the residents, and the parking lot was hidden underneath a public plaza. That idealism would help explain the weird design of the damn thing.
Over the years the complex got squeezed between two opposing forces: the 80's saw the rise of La Défense as Paris' business districts at the same time as poverty and racial tensions made the suburbs, at least in the public perception, risky and unpleasant places. And thus begins the saga of a Russian real estate developer's desperate, multi-decade attempt to replace it with something bigger.
On March 3rd, 2008, the 250 so far very happy households of Les Damiers receive a letter of expulsion giving them 6 months to vacate and leave place for the demolition of the complex and the ground breaking of an absolutely pharaonic twin tower, mixed-use project composed of two towers only 4 meters shorter than Tour Eiffel.
A deal was reached between the owner of the complex, Logis-Transport and the promoter for the eventual sale of the land for 50 million euros, transaction to be finalized when the complex is empty. The money is to be spent on the construction of enough social housing to accomodate every current inhabitant of the complex.
The residents immediately lawyered up, pointing out a history of unjustifiable rent increases, unexplained fees and a lack of maintenance, and claim the sale wasn't entirely legal in the first place, and that in any case the deal is so weird that questions are raised about the potential failure of the project.
Emin Iskenderov is the leader of extremely cyberpunk-named Hermitage group. Iskenderov presents the project to Vladimir Putin and Nicolas Sarkozy at the 2010 Russian National Exposition, where a deal is signed between the two leaders. The project is approved.
In 2011, after 3 years of legal fights by the resident's association, Mirax, which owns Armitage, fails to refinance its $593M of debt, begins its difficult bankruptcy proceedings, and its owner Sergei Polonsky is charged with embezzlement and flees to Cambodia, only to be arrested in 2012.
Iskenderov manages to get his hand on a 700M euro loan (or is it 1.2M? who knows) (at 7% interest) that is to be approved when the permit for the towers is obtained, and thus (kinda, probably) buys out Hermitage from Mirax.
As of a href="https://lagazette-ladefense.fr/2020/11/18/tours-hermitage-bailleur-et-locataires-des-damiers-au-tribunal/">November 2020, only a handful of residents remain, works of asbestos decontamination have begun in some of the towers, and promoter maintains that the project is ready to go. Outright demolition seems imminent.
La Défense has to be the weirdest place I've ever walked
Notice here the number of pedestrian overpasses and the criss-crossing of highway access connectors with pedestrian plazas and hidden pedestrian paths.
Figuring out what overpass connect with that plazas, what pedestrian paths go through which buildings, understanding which plazas open ways to which cardinal directions, and which other overpasses is absolutely impossible. It is the worst aspects of both alienating car-centric american city design combined with the european lack of the will to build everything according to a regular grid pattern. It is both infuriating and thrilling.
Just imagine having an interview for a juicy position at a multinational energy conglomerate and not being able to find the front door of the building. I can't imagine this not happening all the time to everyone
The "cloud towers" are a 1607 units, 18 tower social housing complex built immediately west of the La Défense business disctrict between 1973 and 1981. The structure of the towers were built in one continuous pour using the sliding formwork technique. Legend has it that then French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing saw the first tower under construction and immediately ordered a reduction in height of the rest of the towers.
And as of now, they encapsulate a series of trends and tensions that permeate across the entire stock of french social housing.
First, the styling has been controversial from day one, while at the same time instantly becoming the icon of a style of hopeful top-down government problem-solving and architectural vision, while themselves being unweildy, hard to maintain, hard to inhabit.
Second, they've been under-maintained since the start, and are now in a state of substantial disrepair. The towers were poorly insulated from the start and the residents are complaining of the cold or excessive heating charges in the winter. The uniquely shaped windows are poorly fitted and tend to fall down. Water leaks. The mosaic wall is slowly chipping away, and, with the towers being collectively designated as historical legacy, the state has a moral and quasi-legal obligation to overhaul the cladding as-is.
Third, they now occupy incredibly precious real estate, with them being immediately next to France's new business and banking center that has been developed since the 80's. As such, there's a huge pressure to demolish and let the private sector rebuild, or at least cede some of the space of the existing towers to business use and privately owned condos.
As of 2019, the state is researching options to overhaul, and partially privatize the towers. On top of a direct repair of the mosaic cladding, some people are calling for the towers to be simply clad with inox steel, which would help a lot with the insulation, but architecture conservationists are obviously strongly opposed to hiding the original "cloud" mosaics. One plan calls for selling of 6 of the towers, containing 490 low-cost rental units, to a private developer, that would be free to overhaul the towers as it sees fit (but not demolishing). One thing is certain, is that one of the towers will be demolished. Another plan is to convert a number of towers to a mix of WeWork-style office sharing, artist spaces, and some private condos.
And throughout those discussions, a huge but overlooked factor is the residents, which are majority rather poor, and feeling unsafe in a neighbourhood that sees high rates of crime and drug traffic, and unsatisfied from underfunded and dysfunctional amenities. The residents displaced by the use change of 6 of the towers are to be moved to a new neighbourhood. The remaining worry that their needs are going to keep being ignored as their home is renovated with the views of architectural conservationists, or private promoters included before their own.
Love 5 ever
