Paris, France

In what may very well be the last entry from Paris, I'll try and reflect on the experience as much as possible. My original idea was to have this webslite as a document of my journey, so as to avoid having to do some end-of-trip retrospective. With the internet as it was, that was sadly unfortunate. But I'll do my best anyway.

The trip has evolved just as much as my project. I came here and was surprised by what I was finding. I chose to embrace that, and I think some of my early thoughs about what I would accomplish were in a sense jaded. As I got back into the groove of the city things started making more sense. I was able to think clearer, and understand the city better. I never did come up with a step by step plan on how to read Paris, but that may not even be possible. There is no one certain way to interact with the city. Once can come to see the sites. One can come and work alongside the sites and never visit them, or at least not often. Others may live in the suburbs and commute to the outer arrondissements, never casting a glance at beaux-arts architecture. Others may only choose to live in Paris as a fantasy, through books or movies or television, in lieu of visiting themselves. So I, as a student, as a traveller, cannot say that I have found the way to view Paris. What I have found is A way. One. And it has shaped my understanding.

I'm not going to place a project in Paris. It will be too hard, too difficult to even begin the process. I never found a suitable site, I cannot find measurable maps or documents, and if I forget a photo, I'm screwed. What looks to be a better possibility is a project based in a reachable US city, Washington DC perhaps, and giving the project some French link, so that I can focus on my interpretations of Paris and tie them into the project. This will accompany the document I will make this fall.

The weather just sucked. Today was a fitting memorial for my time here, as it would rain for a few minutes, then be sunny, then another storm would roll in, and so on, throughout the day. It seemed the entire time I was here I was ducking raindrops or getting rained out of a drawing. Last time I was here it was sunny and hot, the entire trip, save for maybe 2 rainy days. This time, it downpoured three weeks ago and hasn't let up since. The dry days are cloudy, and the wet ones are cold and windy. I blame global warming.

In the end, if I had to call it a good or bad trip (because we must always summarize the events of our lives, especially those drawn out over several weeks, with a host of complex emotions interspersed) I would say it was a good trip. It was a good trip because I've packed a lot of experience, a lot of thoughts, of visions, of memories, of concepts, and abstractions into the last 40-odd days. It's helped me understand the built environment and has at least helped me contemplate architectures role within that environment. That, and it is Paris.

For being the supposed heavy time of keeping this journal of my travels, the next step is to keep it up on some sort of semi-regular basis. Of course I'll have a few weeks off, maybe won't work on it much during the first few weeks of school. It will pick up again sporadically, between the lecture and pieceing together some sort of book, to talking to Peter's students, to what will hopefully be a thesis project in the fall. But that's a long way away. For now I'm going to go enjoy the last of 41 days in PARadISe.

Paris, France

With poor weather this morning, I was able to begin another essay, this one focused on the multitude of contemporary projects across Paris and the issue of self-censorship, which ocurred alot while I was still working on the initial research subject. The essay then transits to comtemporary architecture and its obsession with technology, both as a design strategy and technical design driver. I think the essays are getting better with each one, but are getting harder to write, as I get more and more burnt out on a subject. One can only look at the Bibliotheque Nationale Francois Mitterand so many times before shuddering. Be it as it may, the complex plays a critical role in no less than three of my essays, thus far.

I guess the building plays a critical role in my research, at the crux of Parisien culture and technology, contemporary architecture, literature, historic architecture, Corbusian urbanism, and a national history condensed into a series of Grands Projets. Unfortunately I was not able to draw it, as the weather was bad and I struck out without my drawing supplies. But I have a few photos of it though. This photo, taken from the avant>>apres exhibit, casts two of the towers in a snowy fog that captures the isolation of the site. Despite this, the deck remains a farily populated place, and despite the best of my intentions to show it as an isolated uninhabited landscape, I couldn't manage to keep the people out of my photographs. I suppose my personal biases toward the project show through after all. Take that,
self-censorship.

Paris, France

Just over a week left in the trip. Most of my information has been collected, now I'm running around getting some decent night photos as well as redoing day photos of anything I shot in overcast skies. Contemporary architecture is monochromatic enough, it needs all the help it can get.

After searching for a decent competition to base my project off of and failing, I've decided that I should not base my thesis in Paris. It would be hard enough to get site information and decent photos, and I wouldn't have acess to the site if I needed to go back for anything. Right now I'm rethinking the thesis end of this, and am now thinking that if it does follow up this bit of research I should do a "french" project along the east coast in the US. For example, a Franco-American art museum in Washington DC or New York. This gives me the added opportunity to raod test a few of the ideas I have developed here to see if they're valid outside of Paris or Europe, and revisioning Washington DC as a hybrid-Parisian-exquisite corpse may ellicit some interesting parallels to the physical urban environments of each, yielding what would essentially be a museum designed specifically for its context. And, since this whole crazy experiment began by searching for a relationship between contemporary architecture and its context, everyhting seems to meld together at the last moment. This is all rhetoric at this point and I still need to pitch it to possible critics, but for now I think that this route will yield an overall stronger project.

So for the next week I'll continue getting the last of my photos in line, and follow up on some final information concerning the METRO system, a few of the Grands Projets, and an interview, rescheduled for the day before I leave.