Vivere a Riva: Paris!

Saturday, March 24, 2012 -- 9:15PM

Alright I am much overdue with these posts so I am going to try to crank them out tonight. We set out March 3rd for 2 weeks of travel; one week with the group and one week independent. The first 4 days were in Paris. The weather sucked and the city is absolutely giant and not very well organized, but so much to see and do!

We started with two Jean Nouvel projects. The Institute du Monde Arab and Garden of Musee du Quai Branly. We then wondered nearby to the Eiffel tower before dinner and got to see it light up.

The next day we started at Le Parc De La Villette by Bernard Tschumi. This was a huge park that was filled with these red "folies" aka medium size structures that explore some sort of architectural and spacial idea. Though the weather wasn't great, the park was full of activity. A main place for people to exercise and play soccer. We then tried to go to Musee d'Orsay but it was free day so the place was mayhem. We went to the site of the Louvre by I.M. Pei instead. We also weren't able to get into the Louvre because of the lines for free day. We got to Notre Dame right as it started to rain pretty hard so we unfortunately weren't able to get on top, but the inside was beautiful and service was about to begin because it was a Sunday. We made our

way to the Pompidou museum by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, a beautiful building with all the structure and building systems on the exterior, leaving for an extremely open plan on the interior. There is a series of escalators that takes you to a sky walk 6 stories high giving you a panoramic view of Paris. The art and installations in the museum were fantastic. The feature exhibition was Josef Albers, who has some pretty incredible color and spacial studies. That night we had tickets to an Edgar Allen Poe opera performance. It was all in French and very bizarre so it was quite the experience. Nice to see the Opera of Bastille though.

Parc de la Villette

Louvre

It was raining so I didn't get an exterior photo of the Pompidou but here is the model.

The next day we started at the Communist Headquarters designed by Oscar Niemeyer. We met a random employee on the exterior who spoke English and talked to his boss to get us into the building and get a tour. If we didn't have that tour I don't know how I would have felt about the building but the auditorium was incredible. Then we took off towards Sacre Coeur. We didn't have enough time to climb the dome unfortunately but it was a beautiful church and a great view over the city. We continued on near the Eiffel tower with Cite de L'Architecture an amazing Architecture museum. So many historic installations and great models of some of the more important movements in architecture. Needless to say, we spent a lot of time here. Our last day in Paris we started at Maison La Roche, our first Le Corbusier building. Not the most spectacular Corbu house, but still very interesting nonetheless. It was in kinda bad condition unfortunately.

Communist Headquarters

Maison La Roche

Cite de L'architecture

View from Sacre Coeur

Our last day we started with La Defense, the business district towards the outskirts of Paris. Buildings are very contemporary and the most defining one is the cube building. We also spotted a Richard Serra sculpture which was a nice find. We continued further from the city to Poissy to see Villa Savoye, arguably Le Corbusier's greatest contribution to residential architecture. After a couple hours of photographing and sketching, we were able to split from the group and do what we wanted in the city. I really wanted to go to Versailles but the weather didn't seem too favorable. So instead a couple of us went back to actually go inside Musee d'Orsay which ended up being a fantastic choice. One of the coolest buildings and collections of art that I have ever experienced. Definitely a must see in Paris. We thought about trying to climb the Eiffel tower before dinner but there just wasn't the time.