Wet and Not So Wild

I never managed entirely to shed the sore throat and cough I picked up on the way to San Francisco, and this weekend I managed to lose my voice nearly completely.  As we spent Saturday evening in a noisy café where a friend was playing guitar and singing, I wound up spending Sunday in bed, voiceless.  Gene, oddly enough, had no problem with not hearing my dulcet tones for 24 hours.  Go figure.

Although we've had a series of mostly sunny days, today started out damp and continued to rain off and on.  We walked through some of the smaller streets of the neighborhood marveling at how quiet they were on a weekday morning. 

Peering into courtyards and looking up at rooftops, we're reminded again how many lives are lived outside the view of others here.

 

  

If you were to look only at the closed streetfront doors and shop windows you would have little idea of the many ways people live in Paris.  Look at those enormous studio windows visible only from the street directly opposite.  What must it be like to live up there?   Probably quite different from the traditional apartments opening on the courtyard behind the iron latticed door.  

Or maybe not.  We've been in very contemporary spaces transformed within their original 18th or 19th century buildings.  It's always a pleasure to get a glimpse of the living fabric of the city in this way.

Another thing you run into on these smaller streets, where shop signs and restaurant frontages don't obscure the small things, are old or odd signs.  The one above is for a security company that once (maybe still?) secured the building to which it was affixed.  And across the street is this nameplate, with no explanation:

 

This turns out, upon Googling, to be an association offering classes on all things Chinese, from language to martial arts.  

It's this kind of aimlessness, boring maybe, that fills our days.  I love nothing more than to come across something like this storefront, apparently unchanged for generations:

And of course the others, changing with the times, like the Mariage Frères shop around the corner, which now offers De-Stress Tea in a Zen Box and if your stress level is already low, Beautiful Tea in a Happy Box.

Impressions of Prague

The first thing that struck me walking out into Prague was the architecture, the incredible range of style, line, curve, color, decoration, the centuries encompassed within a square mile in the center of the city.

The Old Town includes the enormous bulk of the Church of Our Lady of Tyn, with towers that look like they might have sheltered the Wicked Witch of the East's flying monkey squadron, but that bulk is wrapped by Disney-colored, whipped cream encrusted buildings out of The Student Prince.

I'm embarrassed to say that for a history buff, I know very little Czech history.  I do know they're fond of defenestrating people, a method of getting rid of opponents unique to them as far as I know.  (The Ottomans used to throw people into the sea tied in sacks; everyone's got their favorite method I suppose.)  A lot of what we see in modern day Prague dates from the reign of Charles IV, King and Holy Roman Emperor , who built one of the major attractions, the Charles Bridge, now clogged with tourists and touts but still impressive, particularly from a distance.

 

The over-the-top tendencies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire are responsible for much of the rest of what we come to Prague to see.  However, that all of this is still available to see is apparently due to the fact that Prague was not heavily bombed during World War II and so much that was lost elsewhere in Europe is preserved here.  So in a perverse way one might say that Neville Chamberlain preserved Prague, I suppose.

     

Even outside the old city center, much of it overrun as it is by tourists from everywhere in Europe, they take their decoration seriously.  The towers and turrets atop every apartment building, my god!  You have to be careful not to trip over the cobbles while looking up all the time.

 

 

And the candy colored facades surprised me.  I wonder if it's a reaction to the long dark winters.

You'll notice that many of the photos here show sun.  That was a short period, folks.  For the first time I really understand the phrase "leaden sky".  For the rest of the three days we were there, it rained, or if not actually raining, looked like that's what it really, really, wanted to do.

Both Gene and I noticed, by the way, how empty the streets appeared, aside from the tourist-thronged areas.  Unlike Paris, New York, San Francisco, London, we felt as if we were alone for blocks at a time as we walked around.  The restaurants seemed full, the trams had people on them, but there was little street life.  We missed that.

What the streets had plenty of was ornamentation.  Many buildings still bore the symbols of the use to which they were first put, like the violinmaker's house

Or the fellow who supplied your golden cups.

For those who didn't work for a living, the ornamentation ranged from a pretty bird over the door to an enormous figure holding up the porch.

A center of Art Nouveau decoration as well, Prague buildings don't lack for that style either.

It's actually rather overwhelming, so much to see, ricocheting from one century to another and back again.  

Rainy Days and Architecture

 Studio Raspail in Montparnasse

We had planned a weekend in the country but the rain and traffic caused by the beginning of a weeklong school vacation put the kibosh on that.  Note, by the way, that school only started at the beginning of September and now they're taking a vacation.  Eight weeks of classes sure can wipe you out!  Granted, they go from 8:00 in the morning to 5:00 in the evening, but I think kids should get used to the rat race at an early age.  Hey kids, only another 50 years of it 'til retirement!

So faced with a gray and rainy day, we decided to take a three hour walking tour.

A modernist architectural real estate group has put together a series of parcours, walking tours through parts of Paris that have a particularly large accumulation of 20th century architecture. Today's tour was of artists' ateliers in the 14th arrondissement, an area that includes Montparnasse in the north of the arrondissement and Montsouris, a bit farther south.

You probably know that these areas attracted artists and writers like flies in the years just after World War I.  Paris was an incredibly cheap place for Americans to live and when Russians and others from the east fled revolutions and pogroms they too often came to Paris to share studio space, models and the occasional bottle of wine.  And the native French were no slouches when it came to the louche life.  It was a time of change and one of the things that changed was architecture.

This building is allegedly one of the first to be built by developers specifically targeting the artist market.  It has studio windows, partly in fixed decorated glass, with doors in clear glass.  These face north for the light.  this building was quickly inhabited not by painters but by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Isadora Duncan and Ernest Hemingway.  Here's a detail of the metalwork.  It's clear what attracted them.

These buildings, like the Studio Raspail in the first photograph above, didn't come out of nowhere.  Paris has a tradition of Beaux Arts ornamentation and classic family apartment layouts, many of them from the mid-19th century, when Baron Haussmann tore down the medieval, easily barricaded narrow streets and built hundreds of bourgeois apartment buldings along broad boulevards on which the army could easily maneuver.

Between those buildings and these, were years of transitional ones, like this apartment building on rue Campagne-Première, with its ceramic tile facade and double height atelier windows.

 

Pretty amazing, isn't it?  The ornamentation is still there, but rather than curly Art Nouveau vines, we see stylized flowers in straight lines, circles, triangles and rectangles.  The studio windows were huge, the interiors were lofts with mezzanines, and it was cutting edge for the time.  Again, this building was so cool that it attracted much higher end inhabitants than the artists living in tiny rooms in the Istria Hotel next door.  That hostelry, by the way, has been renovated and shed any vestige of its history as a lodging for Man Ray and Kiki de Montparnasse, among others.

Down the street a bit is this building, rather dilapidated even a hundred years ago, and more reasonable for a working artist.  In fact Giorgio de Chirico lived here in the '20s, we were told.

Mallet-Stevens courtyard facade

In the midst of an undistinguished block of '70s apartment houses and vacant lots is one of the prizes of this tour, a building designed and built by architect Robert Mallet-Stevens.  The street facade of this building is an odd mixture of ordinary 19th century windows over an entry that screams 1930s.

The front door and the round side windows set into a streamlined stone facade lead through the front building into this courtyard.

More striking architectural stained glass is on the right, above the awning.  See that double height studio on the left?  It once belonged to artist Tamara de Lempicka, one of the most streamlined of them all.  It's now on the market for 4.5 million euros, someone told me.  Here's a closer look at the streetside window.

We moved on from the Montparnasse area to a less familiar part of town, close to the Parc Montsouris.  This was a ten minute hike in the rain through a generally nondescript area, although I was pulled here and there by interesting looking buildings that I didn't have time to explore.  Our tour leader was setting a rapid pace and wasn't waiting for stragglers to catch up before going on with her spiel.

A series of small and extremely charming streets awaited us.  Unlike Montparnasse, the Montsouris area has a number of private houses set on private streets.  Developed in the '20s and '30s, many of these were designed and some built by well-known architects for well-known clients.  These artists were by no means starving.

Nor are the present day owners, some of whom have built in-fill buildings that are as interesting as their neighbors had been in their day.

One of the prizes in this area was the first le Corbusier house built in Paris, a small private residence for his friend, the painter Amedée Ozenfant, which takes advantage of its corner location to place studio windows on two sides.

The street leading away from it is far from clean-lined and modern.

 

And if Corbusier had known he'd have this for a neighbor he might have left town.  

And while plantings can cover a multitude of sins, it can also obscure masterpieces.  All you can see of Georges Braque's 1927 house and studio by Auguste and Gustave Perret is this:

 

The edges of Braque's Cubism are rather softened here.  Oh, and I can't help wondering about the frères Perret: which one of them got to be called Gus?

Journées du Patrimoine

I've spent many a Sunday afternoon looking at open houses at home. Yesterday we looked at a different kind of open house here. It was the annual Journées du Patrimoine, "Heritage Days" in French, in which the public is invited into buildings which are ordinarily not open. The lines to get in can be quite long, but are usually worth it if you're interested in architecture or history or are simply nosy and like to snoop where you're not allowed. I fit all three categories and was in my element.

The first hôtel particulier we visited was the Hôtel Amelot de Bisseuil, usually known as the Hôtel des Ambassadeurs de Hollande, in the rue Vieille du Temple in the Marais. This street has become a major artery of today's hip Marais, and the doors to this building are firmly closed, with Medusa heads carved on them to scare intruders away. I'd always wanted to see behind them, and now we could.

This building, as were many in the Marais, had been left to deteriorate and become tenements and workshops until renovations were undertaken in the mid-20th century. The pretty lady in the photo above is only one of the faces carved onto the now cleaned interior facade.

The fellow lurking over the Roman tub is still covered with the grime that remains on the walls of the front entry court. There's never enough money to do it all.


The next building is the Hôtel d'Aumont, on rue de Jouy, now the Administrative Tribunal of Paris. Again, the long history of this building, which passed through many hands over the centuries, led to its deterioration, until at last it was a dormitory for students of the Lycée Charlemagne, a high school nearby. Rescued from the teenage boys, the city of Paris has restored much of its beauty, which contrasts a bit with the modern technology found on the desks and tables throughout. Seventeenth century computer terminals must be hard to get.


This little fellow looks like he's had a great time all along the way.


This ceiling is original to the building and carries the arms and monogram of the owner at the time.

An organization called Paris Historique is responsible for trying to preserve much of the architectural heritage of the city and gave very interesting tours of these and other buildings yesterday. They offer other tours all year long, and we intend to take advantage of them. They're in French but if your language skills allow you to take one, I'd say do it. You won't regret it.