Walking into Architectural history

-
 

This is how we do when we walk the streets of whichever place we're visiting:

We choose a point of interest as our goal and then we stroll serendipitously towards it - looking behind corners, down alleys, inside courtyards - perhaps even wander so far off course, we never arrive to our original goal.

This time our goal was the Ozenfant house - the first Parisian house built by famed architect Le Corbusier.

The search for this house let us deep into 14 arrondissement, which - besides Tour de Montparnasse and the entrance to the catacombs - is probably not on the itinerary of many tourists.



The 14th turned out to be a lovely place to wander around - the Parc Montsouris was so pretty on a sunny afternoon, with its lake and great lawns.


We found the Ozenfant and I took in all the fantastic details - but just from the outside. The building is privately owned and not open for visitors.



Right next to this modernistic masterpiece, we ventured down Square Montsouris, which is actually not a square, but a small alley, and, as such, one of the prettiest we have seen in all of Paris.

The cobbled street is lined with more than fifty art deco houses, where most of the facades are covered in masses of ivy and wisteria

A bit further on, we came by another alley, which turned out to be our biggest discovery of the day.

 


Walking past, I felt like I was looking into a  living museum of the  Modernist Architectural Movement.

We googled the alley, named 'Villa Seurat' and it turned out it was built in the 1920ties, when artists from Montparnasse, the so-called 'Montparnos' could not find places to lodge near their favorite bars (La Coupole, The Dome to name a few).

Faced with this housing crisis, the architect André Lurçat undertook to build several properties on what was originally a wasteland occupied by sheds and stables.




In the  alley, named after the famous pointillist painter George Seurat, lived Salvador Dali and his muse Gala, the author Lawrence Durell, the actor and dramatist  Antonin Artaud - and the two lovers, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, spent years in the street.

The alley looks exactly today as it must have been at the time when all these fabled Montparnos walked the cobblestones, made their art, fought and loved -  and we felt like we had entered a time machine and was about to meet them in the flesh.

Read more about this art deco masterpiece here


If you want to subscribe to my blog, please enter your email address:


Delivered by Google

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Night under the full moon: A unique Parisian gathering

-
Image
  The other night I was invited to a so-called Full Moon Party in the center of Paris. The host was a guy Rita and I met, when we, a couple of years ago, stayed on his houseboat a bit up the Seine. He arranges these casual parties at the middle of the Pont des Arts and he has done so, come rain or come moonshine, every month for the last many years. As I approached the iconic bridge, now mercifully devoid of its plague of "love locks," I was greeted by a cacophony of excited chatter in a United Nations potpourri of accents.  French people as well as expats from many corners of the globe mingled freely, their laughter and chatter forming a symphony of human connection that was actually quite infectious. As I accepted a glass of wine from a beaming Spanish astrophysics student, I pondered the curious phenomenon before me.  Here we were, a motley crew of strangers, united by nothing more than our shared presence in this city and our willingness to gaze skyward toge...
Read more

Stumbling into serenity: The secret garden of Saint-Serge

-
Image
The other day I walked the streets of the edgy, regenerated Villette area of Paris, and here, on one of its busy streets, I stumbled upon what seemed like a portal opening into another time. Entering through an unassuming gate, and going down a narrow,  semi-private alley, I was transported from the frenetic present into a hidden,  quiet garden that turned out to be the garden of the  Saint-Serge de Radonège Russian Orthodox Church.    Photo: SortirAParis Before me unfolded a scene that could have been plucked from a 19th-century Russian novel: Long-bearded orthodox priests wearing flowing black robes and cylindrical kamilávka hats, moved unhurriedly among the flowerbeds, and a group of elderly parishioners sat in the garden, on rickety chairs, chatting in a melodic blend of Russian and  French. The abrupt transition from bustling street to  tranquil sanctuary was so jarring that I half-expected to find my smartphone transfor...
Read more

Entering the Boros bunker - A mind-altering artistic journey

-
Image
Walking into the massive Boros bunker in Berlin's Mitte is like walking into an ancient, alien tomb. This forbidding concrete monolith, built by the Nazis in 1942,  is now the home of an eccentric private art collection.  Inside the building's almost anthill-like network of  underground corridors and crypts, numerous swirling shapes and colors spark the walls into lurid illuminations.   A flood of phantasmagoric images washes over the senses - kinetic sculptures twisting with reptilian menace, multimedia installations flickering with layered meanings. Each new room opens like a portal into a new creative artistic mind - and the story about the building is as exciting as the art which is  displayed inside it. During the war, the bunker sheltered several thousand  civilians from the massive, nightly bombings that hit Berlin. In 1945 the Red Army repurposed the building for prisoners of war and it later became an East German warehouse. After the wall tumble...
Read more