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Even the most punk of buildings eventually gets older. The Pompidou Centre in Paris, the landmark contemporary art museum designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, turns forty this year. To mark its birthday, the museum will get a two-year long facelift estimated to cost at least €... View full entry
The Eiffel Tower is to undergo a €300m, 15-year refurbishment, Paris’s mayor Anne Hidalgo announced on Friday. [...]
The planned refurbishment is intended to bolster the French capital’s bids to host another World’s Fair in 2025 and, before that, the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games [...].
The project will be managed by the tower’s operator, the Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, a public service company wholly owned by the City Council.
— theartnewspaper.com
The 15-year refurbishment of this most-visited monument anywhere in the world (the 127-year-old wrought iron structure has been operating at its maximum capacity of about 7 million visitors since 2003, according to Wikipedia) will take more than a few buckets of paint and also comprises the... View full entry
Situated in Carrière-Sous-Poissy in France along the River Seine, "Poissy Galore" by Armengaud Armengaud Cianchetta (AAC) and Herlach Hartmann Frommenwiler (HHF) is designed primarily as an ecological public space for both Parisian residents and far-flung visitors. Consisting of an observatory... View full entry
When I.M. Pei's Grand Louvre in Paris was first completed in 1989, it was denounced as a modernist insult to its historic location, the 800-year-old Grand Palais. But 27 years later, the 71-foot-tall glass pyramid has become as treasured as the artwork it houses. In an announcement today, the... View full entry
Frank Gehry has revealed that French president Francois Hollande has given him his word that he could self-exile to France now that Donald Trump has been elected the 45th President of the United States.
[...]
With the bleak prognostic becoming a reality, the starchitect might see himself emigrating to a new country, with a big welcome from its leader.
— artnet
Gehry said this during an interview with the French newspaper Le Figaro, where he also railed against critics who don't consider him an artist, as well as most buildings. In fact, Gehry claims a correlation between people's ambivalence towards uninteresting architecture and support for... View full entry
The number of migrants sleeping rough on the streets of Paris has risen by at least a third since the start of the week when the "Jungle" shanty town in Calais was evacuated.
Along the bustling boulevards and a canal in a northeastern corner of Paris, hundreds of tents have been pitched by asylum seekers - mostly Africans who say they are from Sudan - with cardboard on the ground to try and insulate them from the cold.
— Al Jazeera
While their presence is not new, it has grown substantially this week, said Colombe Brossel, Paris deputy mayor in charge of security issues.According to the article, there are up to a thousand more people living on the streets of Paris—amounting to around 2,500 in total—following the closure... View full entry
The modular, prefab 'Simple' house took only two days to build, and is now installed in Paris' Tuileries Garden, part of the FIAC art fair. Nouvel affectionately referred to Simple as "a mobile home that stays still," describing the moveable windows and partitions within the structure.Produced... View full entry
This narrow, nondescript passage — known as the Impasse Ronsin — was once an artery of aesthetic energy that, in no small fashion, defined French postwar art in all its insanity. First the site of the sculptor Constantin Brancusi’s studio, Ronsin was later where the likes of Max Ernst, Yves Klein, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely all lived or worked for much of the 1950s and early 1960s. — NYT
James McAuley previews 'L’Impasse Ronsin' an exhibit at Paul Kasmin Gallery, from Oct. 27, 2016, to Jan. 18, 2017. View full entry
In an effort to curb air pollution, the city council of Paris has approved a controversial plan to pedestrianize the 3.3 km road that runs along the Right Bank of the Seine River. Stretching from the Tuileries Gardens to the Henri-IV tunnel near the Bastille, the road is currently used by some... View full entry
As heavy rainfall floods Paris, the Louvre isn’t taking chances with its priceless art collection and will close on Friday to prevent water damage.
The museum will move pieces from its underground stores to higher floors to keep them safe, according to a Thursday statement. The Louvre is right next to the Seine river, which has risen 16 ft. above its normal levels due to rain over the past few weeks, AFP reports.
— TIME
Abnormally heavy rains have caused flooding in northeastern France as well as parts of Germany this week. In Paris, the Seine has risen 16 feet – the highest since 1960 but still short of the standing record of 26 feet from 1910.The rains and flooding have resulted in nine deaths in Germany... View full entry
Thanks to in situ artist Daniel Buren, the white glassy curved sails of the Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris have received a generous splash of vibrant color — or 13 colors, to be exact...Developed in collaboration with Frank Gehry, Buren's temporary piece, titled “The Observatory of Light“, made its official debut this past Wednesday. It took 29 nights over a period of five weeks to apply the dyed filters and white 8.7 cm-wide strips throughout the building's 3,528 glass panes. — Bustler
Read more about Buren's intervention on Bustler. View full entry
This fall, the Jewish Museum will present what it’s billing as the first United States exhibition devoted to the work of Pierre Chareau, a French Modernist who for decades fell out of the mainstream history of art and architecture [...]
Chareau (1883-1950) was a prolific designer and art collector in France, and best known for his Maison de Verre (“Glass House”), a landmark building in Paris created in 1928 in collaboration with the Dutch architect Bernard Bijvoet...
— the New York Times
The exhibition, entitled "Pierre Chareau: Modern Architecture and Design", is the third exhibition in a trilogy of design exhibitions, following surveys of the work of Isaac Mizrahi and Roberto Burle Marx.The French architect and designer also had an impressive collection of art, which will be on... View full entry
Unveiled this week, the €1bn redevelopment is the largest infrastructure project that Paris has undertaken in decades, aiming to fix the messy tangle where Europe’s biggest underground station disgorges 750,000 passengers a day into a labyrinthine warren of shops [...]
It is hugely overwrought, the layered steel roof pulled to and fro in tortured twists and turns, forming a contorted rollercoaster of curved trusses and angled bracing...
— the Guardian
"The whole thing has a forlorn droop when seen from the west, as if sagging under the weight of expectation. Nor does the colour help. Ranging between sand and rancid butter depending on the light, the yellow steelwork casts a jaundiced pallor across the scene, lending the interiors a decidedly... View full entry
Public tours of a newly-restored Salvation Army shelter in Paris designed by Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret start in April. The tour guides for the 11-storey building, known as the Cité de Refuge, will be the residents of the building themselves who have been trained by the Fondation Le Corbusier.
The Cité de Refuge, which opened in 1933..., is historically significant as Le Corbusier’s first urban housing project and one of only two completed buildings in Paris.
— The Art Newspaper
Does Le Corbusier have you crowing? Check out these related links:Jørn Utzon's final touch to the Sydney Opera House: a Le Corbusier tapestryRenault issues Coupé Corbusier: a concept car to explore "a new way forward", inspired by Le Corbusier“Le Corbusier was a combination of blind and naïve... View full entry
Parisian designer Stéphane Malka Architecture has suggested creating affordable housing in the French capital by adding prefabricated elements on top of and between existing buildings.
The “3box” system does not require the purchase of sites. Instead, the right to build is obtained in exchange for renovating existing buildings.
According to Stéphane Malka, the housing would cost 40% less than the usual market price and could be built quickly and cheaply in workshops.
— Global Construction Plan
"The units would work with a new Parisian law, the Loi ALUR, which states that 70,000 new dwellings should be built each year, and that rents should be stabilised."Interested in other novel housing solutions? Check out some related Archinect coverage:To each their own home: A peek into the... View full entry
