Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk / Arcades Project, 1927-40 “The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished lifelong project of philosopher Walter Benjamin, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron-and-glass covered “arcades” (Passages couverts de Paris). Benjamin’s Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances on the French-Spanish border in 1940. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. These arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire. Benjamin linked them to the city’s distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the Flâneur (i.e., strolling in a locale to experience it).”

Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk / Arcades Project, 1927-40

“The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished lifelong project of philosopher Walter Benjamin, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron-and-glass covered “arcades” (Passages couverts de Paris). Benjamin’s Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances on the French-Spanish border in 1940. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. These arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire. Benjamin linked them to the city’s distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the Flâneur (i.e., strolling in a locale to experience it).”

Rem Koolhaas / OMA, Jussieu / Two Libraries, Paris, France, 1992 “In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, OMA radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building. The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert’s project. However beautiful, Albert’s campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to ‘inhabit’ it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building. To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network. These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then ‘urbanized’ almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below. In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario. Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.”

Rem Koolhaas / OMA, Jussieu / Two Libraries, Paris, France, 1992

“In the award winning scheme for two libraries at Jussieu, a technical university in Paris, OMA radically reconfigures the typical library layout. Rather than stacking one level on top of another, floor planes are manipulated to connect; thus forming a single trajectory - much like an interior boulevard that winds its way through the entire building. The implantation of the new library represents the insertion of a new core, which should at the same time resuscitate the original significance of Albert’s project. However beautiful, Albert’s campus is windy, cold and empty. Rather than being a singular building it is a network. Its endlessness psychologically exhausts in advance of any attempt to ‘inhabit’ it. Intended as the essence of the campus, the pedestrian parvis is experienced as a residual, a mere slice of void sandwiched between sockle and building. To reassert its credibility, we imagine the surface of the parvis as pliable: a social magic carpet. We fold it to form a stack of platforms, which is then enclosed to become a building, which may be read as the culmination of the Jussieu network. These new surfaces - a vertical, intensified landscape - are then ‘urbanized’ almost like a city: the specific elements of the libraries are reimplanted in the new public realm like buildings in a city. Instead of a simple stacking of one floor on top of the other, sections of each floor are manipulated to connect with those above and below. In this way a single trajectory traverses the entire structure like a warped interior Boulevard. The visitor becomes a Baudelairean flaneur, inspecting and being seduced by a world of books and information and the urban scenario. Through its scale and variety, the effect of the inhabited planes becomes almost that of a street, a theme which influences the interpretation and planning of the Boulevard as part of a system of further supra-programmatic urban elements in the interior: plazas, parks, monumental staircases, cafes, shops.”

Selected Portraits by Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, 1820-1910)

  1. French Photographer Nadar, Self-Portrait
  2. French Poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67)
  3. French Painter Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)
  4. French Writer Alexandre Dumas, père (1802-70)
  5. French Actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923)

_

Odilon Redon, The Cyclops, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, 1914 “Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the movement had its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire greatly admired and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and ’70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers. The label “symbolist” itself comes from the critic Jean Moréas, who coined it in order to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadent movement in literature and art. Distinct from, but related to, the movement in literature, symbolism in art represents an outgrowth of the darker, gothic side of Romanticism; but where Romanticism was impetuous and rebellious, symbolist art was static and hieratic.”

Odilon Redon, The Cyclops, Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, 1914

“Symbolism was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the movement had its roots in Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire. The works of Edgar Allan Poe, which Baudelaire greatly admired and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images. The aesthetic was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and ’70s. In the 1880s, the aesthetic was articulated through a series of manifestoes and attracted a generation of writers. The label “symbolist” itself comes from the critic Jean Moréas, who coined it in order to distinguish the symbolists from the related decadent movement in literature and art. Distinct from, but related to, the movement in literature, symbolism in art represents an outgrowth of the darker, gothic side of Romanticism; but where Romanticism was impetuous and rebellious, symbolist art was static and hieratic.”

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