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.