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Jean-Luc Martinez, who was promoted to the directorship of the Musée du Louvre last year, is proposing the most ambitious renovation of the Paris museum since the Grand Louvre project of the 1980s. [...]
Planning the museum’s comprehensive renovation began in June and work is due to start on the main entrance this month. [...] Martinez also plans to devote 1,500 sq. m of space to major temporary exhibitions in the Napoleon Hall, which is beneath the museum’s I.M. Pei-designed entrance pyramid.
— theartnewspaper.com
Friday, August 29:MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bike: The prototype is currently being used to create a mental-map and guidebook for NYC, and an upcoming Kickstarter campaign will attempt to fund the project for commercial sale.In Beirut, a grassroots push for more grass... View full entry
France has embarked on an ambitious plan to remake Paris -- and, in the process, solve its suburbs problem. On Jan. 1, 2016, Paris, along with Clichy and more than 120 of its closest suburbs, will be enfolded into the Métropole du Grand Paris, an ambitious but still ill-defined project to create a sort of uber-city -- an overarching metropolitan government for the greater Paris area, encompassing around 7 million inhabitants and over 270 square miles. — Foreign Policy
This ambitious project will be the first of its kind in the world, one that planners hope can become a model for other cities. The Parisian suburbs – or banlieues – are notoriously underprivileged. Generally, Paris and its environs are markedly economically segregated: the central city is... View full entry
Despite its echoes of Paris’s architectural past, Frank Gehry’s latest museum project—the Fondation Louis Vuitton, opening this fall in the Bois de Boulogne—is like nothing the city has seen before: muscular and delicate, utilitarian and fantastic, a marriage of cultural ambition and private enterprise. Paul Goldberger looks at the genesis of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault’s partnership with Gehry, and the triumphant result. — vanityfair.com
Previously: Gehry-designed Fondation Louis Vuitton to open this October View full entry
The government has now promised €200m (£160m) worth of "important renovation work" on the south side of the [Grande Arche de la Défense] to begin in October and last for two years. The Grande Arche was designed by Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen, who won an international competition to design a 20th century Arc de Triomphe but who was later forced through illness to transfer responsibility for the construction to French architect Paul Andreu. — the Guardian
Sited at the heart of France's main business district at La Défense, the enormous and impressive Grande Arche was always more than a monument to the triumph of humanitarian ideals over military glory. [...]
A quarter of a century on, however, the crumbling state of La Grande Arche de la Défense might be a metaphor for France's struggling economy. [...]
The government has now promised €200m (£160m) worth of "important renovation work" [...] to begin in October and last for two years.
— theguardian.com
Situating The Mound of Vendôme, the current exhibition on view at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, requires looking back into Paris' history after the French Revolution. For a tumultuous two months in 1871, the city was under the control of the Commune de Paris, a socialist revolutionary... View full entry
Frank Gehry can expand his Paris portfolio this fall when the new building for the Fondation Louis Vuitton (previously) will open its doors to the public on Monday, October 27. The center seeks to establish itself as a new location in Paris for contemporary French and international art and... View full entry
The Fondation Cartier, the Paris-based contemporary art foundation, has abandoned plans to relocate from its central Paris premises [...].
In 2011, the president and founder of the Fondation Cartier, Alain Dominique Perrin, asked the French architect Jean Nouvel, to draw up preliminary plans for a new base on Ile Seguin. But Perrin tells The Art Newspaper that he has decided to enlarge the Fondation’s current premises in Boulevard Raspail, and will commission Nouvel to work on the expansion.
— theartnewspaper.com
At a larger scale, the metropolitan regions of Paris and New York City both show significant pedestrian mode shares. New York City has a pedestrian mode share of 34% for all trips citywide ahead of car (33%) and transit (30%)[4] when the Ile-de-France region has a weekday pedestrian mode share of 32%, a car mode share of 43%, and a public transport one up to 21%[5].
[...] How do they support this large pedestrian population and decrease auto-dominance in public space?
— pps.org
The just-elected new Mayor of Paris, Madame Anne Hidalgo, has prepared a revolutionary sustainable mobility project whereby virtually all of the streets of the city will be subject to a maximum speed limit of 30 km/hr.
The only exceptions in the plan are a relatively small number of major axes into the city and along the two banks of the Seine, where the speed limit will be 50 km/hr, and the city’s hard pressed ring road (périphérique) [...].
— World Streets: The Politics of Transport in Cities
Book a trip to the Centre Pompidou in Paris this summer. The Centre is hosting the first major European retrospective of iconic French-Swiss architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi from April 30 to July 28, 2014.
Exploring Tschumi's work from 1975 to the present, the exhibition will feature a thematic arrangement of archival documents, films, and around 350 of his never-before-seen sketches, drawings, collages, and models -- all displayed in an installation he designed himself.
— bustler.net
"The exhibition at the Centre Pompidou — based on Bernard Tschumi’s work as an architect, educator, and writer — explores the making of architecture as a series of arguments, ideas, influences, and responses to the contemporary definition of architecture today."Get more details on Bustler. View full entry
The historic Grand Palais is due for a contemporary touch-up from French firm LAN, who recently won the competition to restructure and expand the monument...Looking beyond the museum's Beaux-Arts style, LAN highlights the museum's durability and flexibility in an effort to bring out the building's full potential. — bustler.net
Have a glimpse of LAN's winning proposal below:Drawings:Find out more on Bustler. View full entry
The Paris Métro, opened in 1900, extends over more than 200 kilometers of track, serving more than 300 individual stops. But there are 11 more stations that, though once built, now stand nearly abandoned. Many of these "ghost" or "phantom" stations shuttered after the occupation during WWII. [...]
Parisian mayoral candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet has a bold plan for these phantom stations ... these abandoned spaces should be reclaimed for the city's residents.
— The Atlantic Cities
Working alongside mayoral candidate Kosciusko-Morizet, architect Manal Rachdi and urban planner Nicolas Laisné composed a few renderings of what the stations could become under the proposal. Featuring Arsenal, one of the stations closed since 1939, here are a few potential uses:Night... View full entry
In the 13th Arrondisement in Paris, the brightly painted "Tour Paris 13" building -- is easy to spot from a distance. Described as the largest group exhibition of street art, Gallery Itinerance gathered over 100 urban artists representing 16 nationalities to use their artistic skills to repaint... View full entry
