Paris: A step into timeless modernity

Yesterday, we were going to the Fondation Le Corbusier.

On our way to this museum, which lies in the posh Paris neighborhood of Auteuil, we passed row upon row of centuries-old homes with bisque stone facades and quiet courtyards - until we stumbled upon a small street, which stopped us in our tracks.

A short, private cul-de-sac with five giant cubist townhouses - the Rue  Mallet-Stevens.

We gazed up at whitewashed facades, sinuous curves, and floor-to-ceiling windows, and we felt like we had stepped into a living architectural exhibit from the interwar period, where - even by today's standards - each house seems as modern as the next. 

When  we googled the street, it turned out that it is named after a now almost forgotten architect,  Robert Mallet-Stevens, who back in the 1920ties designed all five houses  for a group of wealthy bohemians, who embraced the clean lines and geometric forms of the newly developed  Art Deco architecture.

Robert Mallet-Stevens was working at the same time as Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe, and it is sad to know that this obviously extremely gifted architect is now almost forgotten instead of mentioned alongside these two giants 

The reason may  be that Mallet-Stevens ordered his archives destroyed after his premature death in 1945. 

His street still stands, though, and it could probably not have been made today.  

Not because we don’t have brilliant architects in our time, but because it has taken time  and extremely wealthy and courageous  benefactors to achieve an architecture that is this close to perfection. 

 How daring the architecture must have seemed at the time. Stripped of fashionable Belle Époque frills, rejecting historicism entirely. Sheer glass walls replacing bourgeois privacy and propriety. 

Such boldness seems unimaginable today, when architectural innovation is constrained under the weight of regulations  and  penny saving entrepreneurs.

We also read that the history of this radiant street has dark chapters, too.  

The owners of no 3,  a choreographer and his wife, were arrested during the war and sent to Auschwitz, where they died. 

Their house was requisitioned by the French Gestapo, which created prison cells and torture chambers inside, and it is frightening to stand before this beautiful, clean facade and think of the horrors which once took place behind it

In a way this cul-de-sac becomes a Parisian paradox: Both fragile and resilient, luminous and haunted. 

Nothing human endures without its share of shadow.