Architecture of Paris
It was probably made at the beginning of the 1st century during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius to honor the league of the boatmen, who played an important part in the town's economy and religious and civic life.
[5] In 1358, a rebellion of the Parisian merchants against the royal authority, led by Étienne Marcel, caused the King, Charles V, to move his residence to a new palace, the Hôtel Saint-Pol, near the Bastille at the eastern edge of the city.
[9] The Italian Wars conducted by Charles VIII and Louis XII, at the end of the 15th and early 16th century were not very successful from a military point of view, had a direct and beneficial effect on the architecture of Paris.
The flamboyant gothic church of Saint-Nicholas-des-Champs (1559) has a striking Renaissance feature; a portal on right side inspired by designs of Philibert Delorme for the former royal residence, the Palace of Tournelles in the Marais.
The straight geometric lines of the buildings were covered with curved or triangular frontons, niches with statues or caryatids, cartouches, garlands of drapery, and cascades of fruit carved from stone.
[15] In the 17th century, the first large-scale urban planning of Paris was initiated by royal ordinance, largely based on the model of Italian cities, including the construction of the first residential squares.
[citation needed] After the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, his widow, Marie de' Medici, became the regent for the young Louis XIII and between 1615 and 1631 she built a residence for herself, the Luxembourg Palace, on the left bank.
Gabriel borrowed the design of the Pavillon d'Horloge of the Louvre by Lemercier for the central pavilion, a façade influenced by Mansart, and Italian touches from Palladio and Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
The architect, Pierre Contant d'Ivry, died in 1777, and was replaced by his pupil Guillaume-Martin Couture, who decided instead to base his church on the Roman Pantheon; a classic colonnade topped by a massive dome.
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau described his disappointment when he first arrived in Paris in 1731: I expected a city as beautiful as it was grand, of an imposing appearance, where you saw only superb streets, and palaces of marble and gold.
Instead, when I entered by the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, I saw only narrow, dirty and foul-smelling streets, and villainous black houses, with an air of unhealthiness; beggars, poverty; wagons-drivers, menders of old garments; and vendors of tea and old hats.
In 1774 Louis XV had constructed a monumental fountain, the Fontaine des Quatre-Saisons, richly decorated with classical sculpture by Bouchardon glorifying the King, at 57–59 rue de la Grenelle.
In 1806 he began to build a new façade for the Palais Bourbon, the modern National Assembly, to match the colonnade of the Temple of Military Glory (now the Madeleine), directly facing it across the Place de La Concorde.
Hittorff went on to along a brilliant career in the reigns of Louis Philippe and Napoleon III, designing the new plan of the Place de la Concorde and constructing the Gare du Nord railway station (1861–66).
The architectural style of public buildings and monuments was intended to associate Paris with the virtues and glories of ancient Greece and Rome, as it had been under Louis XIV, Napoleon and the Restoration.
Following the return to Paris of the ashes of Napoleon from Saint Helena in 1840, they were placed with great ceremony in a tomb designed by Louis Visconti beneath the church of Les Invalides.
They instituted teaching about a variety of architectural styles at the École des Beaux-Arts, and installed fragments of Renaissance and Medieval buildings in the courtyard of the school so students could draw and copy them.
New types of architecture connected with the economic expansion; railroad stations, hotels, office buildings, department stores and exposition halls, occupied the center of Paris, which previously had been largely residential.
The Gare du Nord, by Jacques Ignace Hittorff (1842–65), had a glass roof with iron columns thirty-eight meters high, while the façade was in the beaux-arts style faced with stone and decorated with statues representing the cities served by the railway.
The headquarters of the bank Crédit Lyonnais, built in 1883 on the boulevard des Italiens in 1883 by William Bouwens Van der Boijen, was in the Beaux-Arts style on the outside, but inside one of the most modern buildings of its time, using an iron frame and glass skylight to provide ample light to large hall where the title deeds were held.
His major achievements between the wars were the building for the Mobilier National (1936) and the Museum of Public Works (1939), now the Economic and Social Council, located on place d'Iéna, with its giant rotunda and columns inspired by ancient Egypt.
The Paris International Exposition of 1937, held on the eve of World War II, was not a popular success; its two largest national pavilions were those of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, facing each other across the central esplanade.
The nearby Palais de Tokyo was another exhibit legacy, designed by André Auber, Jean-Claude Dondel, Paul Viard and Marcel Dastugue (1934–1937), in a similar neoclassic style, with a colonnade.
Intended to honor the Muslim soldiers from the French colonies who died for France during the war, it was designed by the architect Maurice Tranchant de Lunel, and built and decorated with the assistance of craftsmen from North Africa.
The principal architectural projects begun by his successor, Giscard d'Estaing, were the conversion of the Musée d'Orsay, a central railroad station transformed into a museum devoted to 19th-century French art (1978–86), and the City of Sciences and Industry (1980–86) in the Parc de la Villette in the 19th arrondissement, whose features included the La Géode, a geodesic sphere 36 meters in diameter made of polished stainless steel, now containing an omnimax theater (1980–86), designed by Adrien Feinsilber.
His Grands travaux ("Great Works") included the Institut du Monde Arabe by architect Jean Nouvel, finished in 1987; the Grand Louvre, including the glass pyramid (1983–89) designed by I. M. Pei; the Grande Arche of La Défense by the Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a building in the form of a giant ceremonial arch, which marked the western end of the historical axis that began at the Louvre (inaugurated July 1989); the Opéra Bastille, by architect Carlos Ott, opened on 13 July 1989, the day before the bicentennial of the French Revolution, and a new building for the Ministries of the Economy and Finance, at Bercy (12th arrondissement) (1982–88), a massive building next to the Seine which resembled both a gateway to the city and a huge bridge with its feet in the river, designed by Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro.
His last project was located on the other side of the Seine from the Finance Ministry; a group of four book-shaped glass towers for the Bibliothèque nationale de France (1989–95), designed by Dominique Perrault.
In 1967, the Prefect of Paris, representing the government of President de Gaulle, overruled the municipal council decision, raised the height to two hundred meters, to create more rentable office space.
A notable new style of French architecture, called Supermodernism by critic Hans Ibeling, gives precedence to the visual sensations, spatial and tactile, of the viewer looking at the façade.
Since the 1980s the more recent constructions of HLMs, or public housing, in Paris have tried to avoid the massive and monotonous structures of the past, with more picturesque architectural detail, variety of styles, greater use of color, and large complexes broken into smaller mini-neighborhoods.
