Every one who has the slightest regard for historical monuments, who values mediaeval architecture, or cares in the least degree for the beautiful and the picturesque, must heartily sympathize with M. Victor Hugo in his protest against the proposed scheme for uniting the wonderful island of Mont St. Michel with the mainland by means of a causeway, and possibly a railway!
Those who know Mont St. Michel well, and, like the writer, have spent several days upon the island, cannot but feel that such a scheme would not only be a frightful disfigurement, but would entirely destroy all the associations and the poetry of the place. Practical people will say, "Modern improvement cannot stop in its march forward to consider poetical associations and mere artistic whims and fancies." Now, this would be a possible argument if Mont St. Michel were a busy, thriving town, a commercial port, or the seat of great industries; but in a case where the only trade is that of touting, the only visitors sightseers, the only "stock-in-trade" mediaeval remains, surely, from a practical point of view, anything which will injure these antiquities will really destroy the importance of the island, as its only value consists in its wonderful historic and artistic associations.
The first glimpse of Mont St. Michel is strange and weird in the extreme. A vast ghostlike object of a very pale pinkish hue suddenly rises out of the bay, and one's first impression is that one has been reading the "Arabian Nights," and that here is one of those fairy palaces which will fly off, or gradually fade away, or sink bodily through the water. Its solemn isolation, its unearthly color, and its flamelike outline fill the mind with astonishment.
Mont St. Michel is by far the most perfect example of a mediaeval fortified abbey in existence, with its surrounding town and dependencies, all quite perfect; just, in fact, as if time had stood still with them since the fifteenth century. The great granite rock rises to the height of two hundred and thirty feet out of the bay; it is twice an island and twice a peninsula in the course of twenty-four hours. The only approach is at low water, by driving or walking across the sands. When, however, one arrives within a few yards of the solitary gate to the "town," walking or driving has to be abandoned, and here the commercial industries of the inhabitants commence. A number of individuals, half sailors and half fishermen, are standing ready to carry you on their shoulders over the small gully, which is very rarely quite dry. Entering through the old gate one sees two ancient pieces of cannon taken from the English, who unsuccessfully laid siege to the place in 1422. Close to the gate are the two rival inns, which are very primitive in their arrangement, the entrance hall forming the kitchen, as in many old Breton houses.
A second frowning old gateway leads to the single street, which, passing between two rows of antique gabled houses, and under the chancel of the little parish church, conducts one to the almost interminable flight of stone steps leading to the gateway of the monastery. Upon ringing the bell a polite lay brother opens the iron-studded door, and we are admitted into a solemn, vaulted hall, with another stone staircase opposite. Here we go up and up, to a second vaulted hall, where, in olden times, we should have had to give up any arms which we were carrying. Then another stone staircase, which lands us in a small court with a well in it, at the opposite end of which is a heavy and solid arched doorway. We pass through this, expecting to find ourselves on the top of the central tower of the church at least, and are surprised to find ourselves in the solemn and almost dark crypt of the church. Here we have climbed up some 230 feet above the world and the sea to find ourselves in an underground vault; up in the air and down under the rock at the same time. Wonderfully beautiful is this strange crypt, when one's eye gets accustomed to the gloom, with its exquisite ribbed and vaulted roof, supported upon huge circular columns.
The church deserves a few words, as it is a veritable cathedral as to size and grandeur. The choir is immensely lofty, and constructed of granite most elaborately wrought in the later Gothic or flamboyant style. The nave and transepts are in the old Romanesque style, with solid pillars and low round arches. The church is beautifully kept, and contains some very interesting old reredoses and altars with carving in alabaster. The one modern altar in the Lady Chapel is composed entirely of silver! Our space will not permit us to describe the numerous interesting old Abbey buildings--the library, the prior's lodging, the vast kitchen, the prisons, the dungeons, and the means of supplying the place in times of siege. The proposed causeway would join the island to the left of our view, and our readers can imagine the abominable effect of a high embankment disfiguring this point, and breaking through the interesting old walls and towers, with, perhaps, a Brummagem Gothic station against the old time-worn gateway.--H. W. Brewer, in London Graphic.
A great national design competitionFrançois Mitterrand. Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen (1929–1987) and Danish engineer Erik Reitzel designed the winning entry to be a 20th century version of the Arc de Triomphe: a monument to humanity and humanitarian ideals rather than military victories. The construction of the monument began in 1985. Spreckelsen resigned on July 1986 and ratified the transfer of all his architectural responsibilities to his associate, French architect Paul Andreu. Reitzel continued his work until the monument was completed in 1989. was launched in 1982 as the initiative of French president
Located just beyond the city limits, on the other side of the Seine from the 17th arrondissement, the Grande Arche de La Défense anchors the eastern end of the historic axis that stretches from the Louvre down the Champs-Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe.
One of the Grands Projets (Mitterrand’s 15 billion franc program to provide a series of modern monuments to symbolize France’s central role in art, politics, and world economy at the end of the twentieth century), the modern triumphal arch is actually a 35-story office building—a monument to capitalism? The area surrounding La Défense is home to modern office towers housing 14 of France’s top 20 corporations.
Von Spreckelsen’s scheme was chosen by Mitterrand in an international competition for its 'purity and strength'. Von Spreckelsen backed out of the project before its completion, reportedly disheartened by red tape and having grown displeased with his own design. He died before its completion.
Tourist guides tout the arch’s impressive dimensions and statistics: each side is 110m long; the arch contains 95,000 square meters of office space. It is clearly the grandest and the most ‘moderne’ of the Grands Projets. Amidst the superlatives, the most pleasant aspect of the scheme is its surprising (and surprisingly subtle) asymmetry; it is rotated six degrees off center of the axis, breaking the symmetry of its position extending the line of the Champs Elysées. The rotation was not part of the original design, but was done so that the piles supporting the structure could avoid the network of tunnels under the site.
The Arche is almost a perfect cube (width: 108m, height: 110m, depth: 112m); it has been suggested that the structure looks like a four-dimensional hypercubetesseract) projected onto the three-dimensional world. It has a prestressed concreteglass and Carrara marble from Italy and was built by the French civil engineering company Bouygues. (a frame covered with
La Grande Arche was inaugurated in July 1989, with grand military parades that marked the bicentennial of the French revolution. It completed the line of monuments that forms the Axe historique running through Paris. The Arche is turned at an angle of 6.33° on this axis. The most important reason for this turn was technical: With a métro station, an RERArche, the angle was the only way to accommodate the structure's giant foundations. From an architectural point of view, the turn emphasises the depth of the monument, and is similar to the turn of the Louvre at the other end of the Axe historique. station, and a motorway all situated directly underneath the
In addition, the Arche is placed so that it forms a secondary axe (axis) with the two highest buildings in Paris, the Tour Eiffel and the Tour Montparnasse.
The two sides of the Arche house government offices. The roof section, exploited by Stephane Cherki, is an exhibition centre. The vertical structure visible in the photograph is the lift scaffolding. Views of Paris are to be had from the lifts taking visitors to the roof. (After a non-injury accident in the elevators in April of 2010, the Department of Ecology, owner of the roof of the Grande Arche, has decided to permanently close the computer museum, restaurant, and viewing deck. Access to the roof is still possible via the elevators in the north and south walls, but they are closed to the public.
Notre Dame de Paris (French for Our Lady of Paris), also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, [1] is a Gothic, Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra (official chair), of the Archbishop of Paris, currently André Vingt-Trois. The cathedral treasury houses a reliquary with the purported Crown of Thorns.
Notre Dame de Paris was among the first buildings in the world to use the flying buttress (arched exterior supports). The building was not originally designed to include the flying buttresses around the choir and nave. After the construction began and the thinner walls (popularized in the Gothic style) grew ever higher, stress fractures began to occur as the walls pushed outward. In response, the cathedral's architects built supports around the outside walls, and later additions continued the pattern. The cathedral was essentially complete by 1345.The cathedral suffered desecration during the radical phase of the French Revolution in the 1790s, when much of its religious imagery was damaged or destroyed. An extensive restoration supervised by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc removed remaining decoration, returning the cathedral to an 'original' gothic state.
Jean de Jandun recognized the cathedral as one of Paris's three most important buildings in his 1323 "Treatise on the Praises of Paris":
Jean de Jandun recognized the cathedral as one of Paris's three most important buildings in his 1323 "Treatise on the Praises of Paris":
| “ | that most terrible church of the most glorious Virgin Mary, mother of God, deservedly shines out, like the sun among stars. And although some speakers, by their own free judgment, because [they are] able to see only a few things easily, may say that some other is more beautiful, I believe however, respectfully, that, if they attend more diligently to the whole and the parts, they will quickly retract this opinion. Where indeed, I ask, would they find two towers of such magnificence and perfection, so high, so large, so strong, clothed round about with such a multiple variety of ornaments? Where, I ask, would they find such a multipartite arrangement of so many lateral vaults, above and below? Where, I ask, would they find such light-filled amenities as the many surrounding chapels? Furthermore, let them tell me in what church I may see such a large cross, of which one arm separates the choir from the nave. Finally, I would willingly learn where [there are] two such circles, situated opposite each other in a straight line, which on account of their appearance are given the name of the fourth vowel [O] ; among which smaller orbs and circlets, with wondrous artifice, so that some arranged circularly, others angularly, surround windows ruddy with precious colors and beautiful with the most subtle figures of the pictures. In fact I believe that this church offers the carefully discerning such cause for admiration that its inspection can scarcely sate the soul." Cathedral main hall: 6:45 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. (visitors' circulation is partially interrupted during masses and services) Cathedral Towers:
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In 1858, Napoleon III decided to build the Grand Opera, for which Paris had long been awaiting, in the new business quarter designed by Baron Haussmann. The previous halls, since the foundation of the Académie Royale de Music, founded in 1669 by Louis XIV, had been either of temporary construction or had been destroyed by fires. On 29 December 1860, an architectural competition was organized for the new opera house. Of the 171 architects participating, Charles Garnier's design was the unanimous choice, maintaining a clear picture of the internal functions of the building in its external architecture, Garnier created an Opera House and stage in the traditional Italian style, and in a grandiose setting, inspired both by the Grand Theatre in Bordeaux built by Victor Louis in 1870 and by the Italian and French villas of the 17th and 18th centuries. The venue was intended to host the festivities of the Emperor's entourage and of elegant audiences from the moneyed and social élite, for whom a night at the Opera was a pleasant excuse for meeting people and renewing acquaintances. For this reason, the passages, halls, foyers, staircases, and rotundas occupy a far larger area than the theatre itself.
CHARLES GARNIER'S PROJECT
Construction started in 1861 and lasted for 14 years. The massive works were slowed down by the discovery of a water table that had to be drained before building an enormous concrete well designed to carry the gigantic stage and fly tower. The well was filled with water in order to counter the water pressure (hence the legend of the underground lake popularized by Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera). The 1870 Franco-Prussian war and the Commune interrupted the construction works, but the fire at the old opera in Rue Le Peletier in 1873 hastened the completion of the monument. It was officially inaugurated during the Third Republic by Field Marshall de Mac-Mahon on 5 January 1875.
The building, which is a perfect example of 19th century stage architecture, hides its iron frame under flamboyant decoration. The overall impression is harmonious in spite of the diversity of its inspiration and the temes taken up by Charles Garnier. He personally supervised the integration in the architecture of decorative works entrusted to sculptors, painters and mosaic artists representative, as himself was, of state-sponsored artists.
TRIUMPH OF ECLECTICISM
Thanks to the diversity of the materials used in the building of the house, you're immediately struck by a full range of colours, right from the façade which opens into the fairy-tale world of the Opera House, to which the two side pavillions formerly also provided access: for the regular subscribers on one side and for the Emperor on the other. They are today occupied by the Library and the Opera Museum. At the right of the entrance halls, there is the famous group of dancers by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux - the original is in the Musée d'Orsay. The great staircase continues down towards Pythia's water basin and the former subscribers' rotunda. The stairs are decorated in marble and onyx, a true theatre of worldly events, while the lobby is decorated with Venetian mosaics. Two small rooms, one dedicated to the Moon, the other to the Sun, lead to the main foyer, a princely gallery of gilded luxury in which the mythological characters and the allegories of Paul Baudry stand out. The rotunda is adorned by eight tapestries made by the Gobelins, under a ceiling by Georges Clairin. In the auditorium itself, the great chandelier illuminates the ceiling by Marc Chagall, which has, since 1964, covered the original work of Jules-Eugène Lenepveu. Echoing the colorful style dear to Charles Garnier's, Chagall has designed his painting as a living image of the festive spririt surrounding each performance: luminous, fluid figures surge forth, contrasting with the gold and red tones of the theatre.
THE PARIS OPERA
>From 1881 down to the present day, several restoration and modernization programmes have made the theatre increasingly functional without lessening its appeal as a monument: technical progress and the evolution of sets under the influence of "verism". The next step was the building of a modern and popular opera house: Opera Bastille
Addres:
Opera National de Paris8, Rue scribe 75 009 Paris,France.
Tel : +33(1) 44 73
Ticket prices:
- Category 1 590
- Category 2 470
- Category 3 315
- Category 4 210
- Category 5 130
- Category 6 60
