This, to the best of my knowledge, is a strictly French phenomenon. Similar houses (built for commoners) in Rome have perfectly vertical facades. What was the big idea?
I hasten to add that in the historical center of Paris and beyond, such houses are commonplace. They're literally everywhere. No doubt Haussmann razed many of them during the Great Reconstruction, but he couldn't knock down all of them: all side streets are lined with them.
Sometimes, you see the front of the ground floor of such a house tilted the opposite way, so that the whole thing looks like a section of a pyramid standing on top of a section of an upended pyramid.
The only thing I can think of (and I'm probably wrong) is that this has to do with the building materials. In Rome, they used bricks and lime render, while in Paris limestone seems to have been the material of choice.
The reason for mansard roofs, the steep almost wall like roofs that are very steep at the top is that the French government, during the second empire, did not tax the attic space so any rooms behind slanted walls were not taxed and thus we get the very steep walls and dormers in french architecture in the 1800s into the early modern period. It is all an elaborate tax avoidance scheme. If it is slanted and has shingles on it it is a roof not a wall and the space enclosed is not taxed.
Also some building are very old surviving fires, wars and are slowly sagging over time.
Thank you. Food for thought. Pardon me, but are you absolutely sure that these buildings are from the 19th Century, and not older? I mean, the city is practically studded with them, including the Marais neighborhood which wasn't touched by the Reconstruction. ... Another thing: since they're so ubiquitous, wouldn't the government of the Second Empire see through the tax scheme and put a stop to it?
Yes a lot of the buildings are not medieval but newer or extensively renovated, and to add even more confusion the buildings in Paris were often extended vertically over the years as demand for space grew that and stylish new decorations were added to the buildings often. The tax scheme in France was not so rigorously enforced as they were in between revolutions and other political upheavals often so I suspect the government did not want to press their luck. The Second Empire is a distinct style and it even shows up in the US, but not for the tax reasons.
mansard roofs do not equal Second Empire. However, there is more to defining a building as "Second Empire" style than the mansard roof. Mansard roofs existed before Second empire. Part of the Louvre has Mansard roof which was is credited to Pierre Lescot. This takes us back to like 1550 or so about. It was popularized by Francois Mansart. (You know, it's kind of where the roof got its name. It was used during the French baroque period of architecture. The purpose of the Mansard roof itself had little to do with any such taxes. The purpose of the mansard roof design had to do with the functional purpose of maximizing interior space of the attic floor and have a larger floor area which a person can stand up inside without having to crouch down. It's popularization initially had more to do with Parisian zoning regulation in 1783. Buildings were limited to 20 meters (~65 ft) but measured to the cornice. The mansard roof was a nice way to work around the zoning height limit because the high steep vertical-oriented roof made for a more usable floor area and maximizing the interior space of this attic area. The Second Empire period was in the 1850s. Outside of France, there were various zoning regulations which the mansard roof had been used to maximize space and overcoming zoning regulations.
To determine the age of any particular building will take a more intricate analysis process. It is hard to tell just from the photos. On one hand, some of them are rather old and you could potentially tell by studying it's exterior and a little researching for verification and validation. It is a process to know definitively and while you can "know" by your gut but to stand scrutiny, you must defend with facts other than your 'gut feeling' which doesn't count for squat even if your gut feeling is on the right path. A number of buildings have been remodeled, altered, etc. over the course of history and it can be very difficult because some stuff that appears newer is because of facade alterations. In historic preservation, we do analyze buildings in determining its integrity. We're not talking structural integrity when it comes to reconnaissance level survey because you are either on the sidewalk or in a car making that analysis which is limited. You can compare older photographic documentation with the current and see what changed. Sometimes a building is so altered, it is essentially no longer its original structure and may have components going back centuries but a lot has changed, new material replacing old material, etc. From mere photographs, we can make an educated guess but caveat is more research and more thorough analysis would need to be done to know but this leads to things like owner's permission, maybe a contractual agreement and so forth.
I look at that photo and remember the folks out sweeping in the morning with those crazy old school balais & the water running along the curb to clean the street debris - so clean (almost disney-esque, but maybe that's a bit harsh). Admittedly I have not been there in donkey's years...is it still like that?
Portland is currently a trashy nightmare by comparison right now
I once had high hopes of Portland when it was advertised as a city determined to restore its erstwhile architectural glory by rebuilding its downtown in the "traditional" style, with lots of attractive squares full of trees, cafes, bars, etc, each dominated by a gothic revival church or some such, and replacing all buses with streetcars, etc. The idea was, I guess, to turn it into a second Paris or Rome. I guess it didn't work out. Which is a pity.
Not sure about Paris but here in Amsterdam/the Netherlands the facades are also tilted (but other way around?):
There are a couple of theories why this is:
1 - Makes it easier to hoist stuff up as there is a beam at the top of the facade sticking out to use as a kind of pulley (these also used to be warehouses for storage of shipped goods from afar)
2 - They used to build here in wood, as it was widely available and cheaper. It was better for drainage and waterproofing and easier construction/detailing to have a slight overhang or cantilever for each added floor. Later because of risk of fire they changed the law and only allowed brick facades, so instead of tearing everything down they just replaced the overhanging wooden facades with brick, therefore there are now tilted brick facades.
that's interesting. i would have assumed it was just settlement due to the way amsterdam is built on old piles and drained land. or possibly owners trying to sneak extra floor space into tight lots.
Uh, no, here's what happened: the plum bob was distributed only among the elite architects and engineers throughout the centuries. Which is why the facades on buildings that cost tons of money, such as churches and palaces, are perfectly vertical. Architects specializing in housing for plebeians were denied access to the plumb bob on the grounds there wasn't enough of them (plumb bobs) to go around and were promised to be issued plumb bobs as soon as the manufacturer and distributor got their acts together and produced enough of them for everybody.
In the photo the OP posted the buildings from the ground to eye level appear to be leaning outward and from eye-level up seem to be leaning backwards. I think the camera lens in the smart phone camera may be the culprit.
The first floor was built with straight vertical walls. There's a cornice trim. The wall above it has a slight curved battered. The bottom of the wall at the second floor is flared to the cornice (what I would call a datum line trim or water table trim as it is sometimes called but is used to break of the facade mass) for trim. Once you get up to the level of the cornice trim between the wall and the mansard roof, there is an architectural detailing on the bottom of the cornice as it flares out to support the bottom flare of the mansard roof. As you may notice the walls above the second floor appears to be "cement" (it maybe a mortar stucco or something other than portland cement as a possibility) stucco finish of some kind. It would not be uncommon to flow the stucco out to the trim between street level floor and the floor above (2nd story for all intents and purpose as I don't know or can tell if there is a basement floor). That is how it looks to me based on the photo. It can be a camera lense induced optics illusion. It may be a little bit of it of the reason of making it more pronounced (noticeable) but I suspect it is partly what I am saying initially combined with the lens optical effect.
I haven't been to Paris in 25 years so this was a good opportunity to take a quick tour of a few arrondissements, and I found the view in the OP: https://goo.gl/maps/4n4mq2CzPz.... There is some lens distortion but there also seems to be some lean in the buildings on that little side street, but it's not typical.
I would guess that like old buildings in the US, over time there is settling, and repairs, and more settling, and more repairs. I've worked on a lot of old homes (and live in one built in 1830) and the structure often rests on the huge center chimney, which sinks into the ground over time so everything slopes toward the center. There may have also been a tradition of battering, or sloping the walls inward for stability.
There is a history of battering masonry walls. Especially with brick and stone masonry. This is not unusual. One reason for it is, walls are thicker on the lower floors and get thinner as you go up in stories. It's for both stability and also to an extent economy. You don't need as think of a wall on the top floor because all you are needing to support is a roof and loads on roof. The next floor down would need to be a little thicker because it will support the weight of the loads on the roof, the roof, and the weight of the floor it is supporting and the loads on them. It accumulates all the way down to the footing which then is spreading out the loads over a wider area as needed for the ground it is on. Settlement happens but some of it like in the photo above or if all the buildings in the area and not just the area of the common soil classification... there is likely some reason and it might not be for reasons of settlement of the building as much as those also usually have cracks which you should see them and likely other similarly built buildings in the same area would likely also be showing similar problems due to the building settling. Thayer-D's photo above appears to show walls were intentionally battered because settlement would be cracking the "stucco" facade.
Why are the facades of many of the old residential buildings in Paris tilted backwards?
This, to the best of my knowledge, is a strictly French phenomenon. Similar houses (built for commoners) in Rome have perfectly vertical facades. What was the big idea?
I hasten to add that in the historical center of Paris and beyond, such houses are commonplace. They're literally everywhere. No doubt Haussmann razed many of them during the Great Reconstruction, but he couldn't knock down all of them: all side streets are lined with them.
Sometimes, you see the front of the ground floor of such a house tilted the opposite way, so that the whole thing looks like a section of a pyramid standing on top of a section of an upended pyramid.
The only thing I can think of (and I'm probably wrong) is that this has to do with the building materials. In Rome, they used bricks and lime render, while in Paris limestone seems to have been the material of choice.
Any ideas?
The reason for mansard roofs, the steep almost wall like roofs that are very steep at the top is that the French government, during the second empire, did not tax the attic space so any rooms behind slanted walls were not taxed and thus we get the very steep walls and dormers in french architecture in the 1800s into the early modern period. It is all an elaborate tax avoidance scheme. If it is slanted and has shingles on it it is a roof not a wall and the space enclosed is not taxed.
Also some building are very old surviving fires, wars and are slowly sagging over time.
Over and OUT
Peter N
Economics rule.
Thank you. Food for thought. Pardon me, but are you absolutely sure that these buildings are from the 19th Century, and not older? I mean, the city is practically studded with them, including the Marais neighborhood which wasn't touched by the Reconstruction. ... Another thing: since they're so ubiquitous, wouldn't the government of the Second Empire see through the tax scheme and put a stop to it?
Yes a lot of the buildings are not medieval but newer or extensively renovated, and to add even more confusion the buildings in Paris were often extended vertically over the years as demand for space grew that and stylish new decorations were added to the buildings often. The tax scheme in France was not so rigorously enforced as they were in between revolutions and other political upheavals often so I suspect the government did not want to press their luck. The Second Empire is a distinct style and it even shows up in the US, but not for the tax reasons.
Thank you again! More food for thought.
However, here's a sketch from 1750 (a full century before the Second Empire) of the Place de Greve. The facades are already tilted.
Masonry load bearing walls often are thicker at the base of a building which might also account for the tilt or the appearance of the tilt.
But only in Paris. Not in Lyon. Not in Orleans, either. Not in Nice. And not in Italy.
why do you keep saying "over n out" but then you keep replying?
mansard roofs do not equal Second Empire. However, there is more to defining a building as "Second Empire" style than the mansard roof. Mansard roofs existed before Second empire. Part of the Louvre has Mansard roof which was is credited to Pierre Lescot. This takes us back to like 1550 or so about. It was popularized by Francois Mansart. (You know, it's kind of where the roof got its name. It was used during the French baroque period of architecture. The purpose of the Mansard roof itself had little to do with any such taxes. The purpose of the mansard roof design had to do with the functional purpose of maximizing interior space of the attic floor and have a larger floor area which a person can stand up inside without having to crouch down. It's popularization initially had more to do with Parisian zoning regulation in 1783. Buildings were limited to 20 meters (~65 ft) but measured to the cornice. The mansard roof was a nice way to work around the zoning height limit because the high steep vertical-oriented roof made for a more usable floor area and maximizing the interior space of this attic area. The Second Empire period was in the 1850s. Outside of France, there were various zoning regulations which the mansard roof had been used to maximize space and overcoming zoning regulations.
To determine the age of any particular building will take a more intricate analysis process. It is hard to tell just from the photos. On one hand, some of them are rather old and you could potentially tell by studying it's exterior and a little researching for verification and validation. It is a process to know definitively and while you can "know" by your gut but to stand scrutiny, you must defend with facts other than your 'gut feeling' which doesn't count for squat even if your gut feeling is on the right path. A number of buildings have been remodeled, altered, etc. over the course of history and it can be very difficult because some stuff that appears newer is because of facade alterations. In historic preservation, we do analyze buildings in determining its integrity. We're not talking structural integrity when it comes to reconnaissance level survey because you are either on the sidewalk or in a car making that analysis which is limited. You can compare older photographic documentation with the current and see what changed. Sometimes a building is so altered, it is essentially no longer its original structure and may have components going back centuries but a lot has changed, new material replacing old material, etc. From mere photographs, we can make an educated guess but caveat is more research and more thorough analysis would need to be done to know but this leads to things like owner's permission, maybe a contractual agreement and so forth.
I don't see any face-masks in the picture, so I'm assuming this is a very old picture, likely dating back to the French-revolution.
Didn't know that about old parisian buildings
I look at that photo and remember the folks out sweeping in the morning with those crazy old school balais & the water running along the curb to clean the street debris - so clean (almost disney-esque, but maybe that's a bit harsh). Admittedly I have not been there in donkey's years...is it still like that?
Portland is currently a trashy nightmare by comparison right now
It is still like that. It's still like that in New York, too. As for Portland, as in ... Portland, Oregon, I take it?
yeah, we've not done well with the pandemic homeless camping issue + anarchist "protest" destruction issue
I once had high hopes of Portland when it was advertised as a city determined to restore its erstwhile architectural glory by rebuilding its downtown in the "traditional" style, with lots of attractive squares full of trees, cafes, bars, etc, each dominated by a gothic revival church or some such, and replacing all buses with streetcars, etc. The idea was, I guess, to turn it into a second Paris or Rome. I guess it didn't work out. Which is a pity.
Not sure about Paris but here in Amsterdam/the Netherlands the facades are also tilted (but other way around?):
There are a couple of theories why this is:
1 - Makes it easier to hoist stuff up as there is a beam at the top of the facade sticking out to use as a kind of pulley (these also used to be warehouses for storage of shipped goods from afar)
2 - They used to build here in wood, as it was widely available and cheaper. It was better for drainage and waterproofing and easier construction/detailing to have a slight overhang or cantilever for each added floor. Later because of risk of fire they changed the law and only allowed brick facades, so instead of tearing everything down they just replaced the overhanging wooden facades with brick, therefore there are now tilted brick facades.
that's interesting. i would have assumed it was just settlement due to the way amsterdam is built on old piles and drained land. or possibly owners trying to sneak extra floor space into tight lots.
Rando - that's cool. I've always LOVED the architecture in Amsterdam.
Some are for settlement issues but that's another story.
Maybe they didn't get the plumb bob til later? ;p
I hope, if anyone ends up with a historical accounting of these little quirks, they post it up...pretty interesting.
Uh, no, here's what happened: the plum bob was distributed only among the elite architects and engineers throughout the centuries. Which is why the facades on buildings that cost tons of money, such as churches and palaces, are perfectly vertical. Architects specializing in housing for plebeians were denied access to the plumb bob on the grounds there wasn't enough of them (plumb bobs) to go around and were promised to be issued plumb bobs as soon as the manufacturer and distributor got their acts together and produced enough of them for everybody.
phd thesis, a thick book
Yeah, but one would need to obtain some info first.
won'
t find it here
Do point me in the right direction, then, why don't you.
In the photo the OP posted the buildings from the ground to eye level appear to be leaning outward and from eye-level up seem to be leaning backwards. I think the camera lens in the smart phone camera may be the culprit.
The first floor was built with straight vertical walls. There's a cornice trim. The wall above it has a slight curved battered. The bottom of the wall at the second floor is flared to the cornice (what I would call a datum line trim or water table trim as it is sometimes called but is used to break of the facade mass) for trim. Once you get up to the level of the cornice trim between the wall and the mansard roof, there is an architectural detailing on the bottom of the cornice as it flares out to support the bottom flare of the mansard roof. As you may notice the walls above the second floor appears to be "cement" (it maybe a mortar stucco or something other than portland cement as a possibility) stucco finish of some kind. It would not be uncommon to flow the stucco out to the trim between street level floor and the floor above (2nd story for all intents and purpose as I don't know or can tell if there is a basement floor). That is how it looks to me based on the photo. It can be a camera lense induced optics illusion. It may be a little bit of it of the reason of making it more pronounced (noticeable) but I suspect it is partly what I am saying initially combined with the lens optical effect.
I haven't been to Paris in 25 years so this was a good opportunity to take a quick tour of a few arrondissements, and I found the view in the OP: https://goo.gl/maps/4n4mq2CzPz.... There is some lens distortion but there also seems to be some lean in the buildings on that little side street, but it's not typical.
I would guess that like old buildings in the US, over time there is settling, and repairs, and more settling, and more repairs. I've worked on a lot of old homes (and live in one built in 1830) and the structure often rests on the huge center chimney, which sinks into the ground over time so everything slopes toward the center. There may have also been a tradition of battering, or sloping the walls inward for stability.
I think that's right. Most of the old medieval fabric of Paris was timber and with a masonry chimney structure, it would have settled inward.
.
There is a history of battering masonry walls. Especially with brick and stone masonry. This is not unusual. One reason for it is, walls are thicker on the lower floors and get thinner as you go up in stories. It's for both stability and also to an extent economy. You don't need as think of a wall on the top floor because all you are needing to support is a roof and loads on roof. The next floor down would need to be a little thicker because it will support the weight of the loads on the roof, the roof, and the weight of the floor it is supporting and the loads on them. It accumulates all the way down to the footing which then is spreading out the loads over a wider area as needed for the ground it is on. Settlement happens but some of it like in the photo above or if all the buildings in the area and not just the area of the common soil classification... there is likely some reason and it might not be for reasons of settlement of the building as much as those also usually have cracks which you should see them and likely other similarly built buildings in the same area would likely also be showing similar problems due to the building settling. Thayer-D's photo above appears to show walls were intentionally battered because settlement would be cracking the "stucco" facade.
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