Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Interesting and frightening were Le Corbusier's plans for Paris that never left the drawing
board. Plan Voisin (Neighbour Project; 1925) envisaged wide boulevards linking the Gare
Montparnasse with the Seine and lined with skyscrapers. The project would have re-
quired bulldozing much of the Latin Quarter.
Contemporary
For centuries France's leaders sought to immortalise themselves by erecting huge public
edifices ('
grands projets
') in Paris. Georges Pompidou commissioned the once reviled, now
much-loved Centre Pompidou. His successor, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, was instrumental in
transforming the derelict Gare d'Orsay train station into the glorious Musée d'Orsay (1986).
François Mitterrand surpassed all of the postwar presidents with monumental projects cost-
ing taxpayers €4.6 billion: Jean Nouvel's Institut du Monde Arabe (1987), built during this
time, mixes modern Arab and Western elements and is arguably one of the city's most beau-
tiful late-20th-century buildings. Jacques Chirac orchestrated the magnificent Musée du
Quai Branly, a glass, wood and sod structure with 3-hectare experimental garden, also by
Jean Nouvel.
Ground-Breaking Designs
Recent years have seen the construction of several modern Parisian landmarks: IM Pei's
glass-pyramid entrance at the hitherto sacrosanct and untouchable Musée du Louvre, an ar-
chitectural cause célèbre that paved the way for Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti's magnifi-
cent 'flying carpet' roof atop the museum's Cour Visconti in 2012; the city's second opera
house, tile-clad Opéra de Paris Bastille, designed by Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott in
1989; and the monumental Grande Arche de la Défense by Danish architect Johan-Otto von
Sprekelsen in the same year; the delightful Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et
de Danse (1990) and Cité de la Musique (1994), designed by Christian de Portzamparc in
the whimsical Parc de la Villette; the four glass towers of the €2 billion Bibliothèque Na-
tionale de France (Dominique Perrault, 1995); and neighbouring M2K Bibliothèque pleas-
ure palace (Wilmotte & Namur, 2003) in a glass shoebox that glimmers at night.
The
grand projet
of the new millennium was Jean Nouvel's long-awaited Philharmonie de
Paris, a state-of-the-art creation that took three years to build and cost €381 million. On a
more human scale is the redeveloped warehouse district known as Masséna Nord, where
narrow streets and open blocks link conversions such as the Grands Moulins (an old mill
that is now the hub of the new Paris Diderot University), the former SNCF cold-storage
