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George-Eugène Haussmann, the man who created Paris
- Aissen 11y agoThis is so true. What a visionary. Paris would be a totally different beast if it was not for him. This makes you regret that there were no such visionary (on a similar scale) in the twentieth century.
- benpbenp 11y agoUgh, regarding the lack of such a twentieth century visionary, look up Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin for an idea of what such a thing might have looked like!
- agumonkey 11y agoThe problem with LeCorbusier era (IMO) is that few people may understand what he was doing, and large scale project and industries would have led to yet another clusterfuck. Also his big plan, like many utopic and euphoric ideas of this era are only good on paper or as set for SF movies (lookup where total recall was filmed)
- oh_sigh 11y agoLook at Corbusiers own work. It was pure shit. It doesn't matter if you had 100% sign on from every industry. Garbage in, garbage out.
- trgn 11y agoLe Corbusier indeed built shit after he became an ideologue first, and an architect second. Before that, his family residences were quite appealing though. But those were so bourgeois, the horror.
- js2 11y agoOscar Niemeyer? Frederick Law Olmsted?
- zb 11y agoAlbert Speer?
- msellout 11y agoCharles Bulfinch for Boston.
- yborg 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Burnham
- js2 11y agoI highly recommend https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Devil_in_the_White_City
- JBReefer 11y agoNew York had Robert Moses, who fucked the city up so badly that the subway carries half the people it once did, and the population has only just reached the pre-Moses highs. Not all grand visions are for the best.
- contingencies 11y agoManhattan owes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson_Downing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson_Downing
- smooveysmoove 11y agoRobert Moses? Maybe not with the same aesthetic results but for better or worse NY (and by influence much of the urban us) would be very different without him
- Outdoorsman 11y agoThe work of Walter Burley Griffin in laying out the Australian capital city of Canberra deserves a mention...certainly a 20th century effort... I backpacked Australia for 6 months back in 1985 and saw his work first-hand...though I'm in no way an urban planner, or civil engineer I had no trouble appreciating the influence of his methodology and planning...beautiful layout... Beautiful photos of Canberra from Mt. Ainslie here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#/media/File:Canberra_viewed_from_Mount_Ainslie.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra#/media/File:Canberra_...
- cm2187 11y agoI would like to agree. But unfortunately architects followed the same path as painters. Architects until the XIX were concerned about making things beautiful, carefully respecting ratios, etc. Modern architects have no such concern and now are trying to make things original, even if it means people must live in a world of raw concrete. Millions of tourists travel to see Paris. No such enthusiasm to visit modern cities. I would think twice before letting a modern architect wipe out a whole city.
- gerbilly 11y agoDuring the revolution, no one had an accurate map of Paris. This is what made the barricade such an effective tool. People could throw up a few barricades and quite effectively defend a neighbourhood. When the army showed up they had to channel through narrow unfamiliar streets. If the tide turned against the people, they often managed to escape through a little known back alley. The "Grande Boulevards" may look majestic, but they are also military roads. They make it easier to move troops within the city.
- SFjulie1 11y agoThe supputative remaining of the "cour des miracles" (~ rue du Caire // north montorgueil, la butte aux cailles, ménilmuche & place St Marc appeals more to my heart of former parisian than 4 septembre, champs Elysee, havre cau, Bvd des Maréchaux and other boulevards.
- vonnik 11y agoLet's be really clear: Haussmann built an autocrat's city. He was the architect of Louis-Napoleon, nephew of the former French emperor, and the city was built during the so-called second empire. That is, it does not reflect democratic values. How does it not reflect them? Well, the broad avenues radiating from star-like intersections are meant to favor the artillery if rebels ever try to build a barricade. This structure was later used to shape Washington DC. These considerations were important because of the Paris Commune of the 1870s, where the people of Paris rebelled against what they felt was bourgeois oppression. Except for a few periods after WWI and WWII, when artists like Picasso or Hemingway briefly frequented a poor and beautiful city, Paris has been a bourgeois stronghold ever since. This has huge cultural ramifications, many of them negative, for life in the city, since a premium is put on proper behavior and, above all, silence. Haussmann's ravages pushed the working class out into the suburbs -- what people now refer to the Red Belt -- depriving Paris of much of its vibrant street life. There were huge tradeoffs in the makeover, so let's not unduly idolize him.
- btilly 11y agoHuge public outlay for wide roads, originally designed for military use and now used heavily by civilians. Where have I heard that before? Oh right. The US Interstate System! :-) Incidentally for a similarly influential person in US history you have to look no farther than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses. I'm in awe of the audacity of slipping unlimited power to construct roads into a bill about parks, while planning to become the person who would have that power. The authority in question was the ability to construct parks anywhere, and the right to build access roads for them. So he created a series of long narrow parks, and built big fat access roads down the middle. That is why those roads got named, "parkways"!
- clock_tower 11y agoBut the Interstates weren't specifically designed to give an advantage to the government in street fighting. Haussmann's boulevards were designed for easy access for artillery (and cavalry?), and to make barricade-construction impossible, as vonnik noted -- not to facilitate movement and redeployment like the Interstates. (I've heard the rumor that the Interstates were meant to facilitate suburbia from the start -- on the theory that if the country's population and economic activity spread out into the suburbs, we'd be harder to ruin with a small number of nuclear weapons.) That said, Robert Moses was certainly a tyrant of urban planning on the same level as Haussmann. White ethnic populations of the Northeast still remember him, and have not yet forgiven him for his habit of running freeways through their neighborhoods -- ruining the neighborhoods in the process, and in many cases driving them out to the ethnically-homogenous blandness of the suburbs. I'm also reminded of Le Corbousier. Architecture can certainly attract autocrats...
- saretired 11y agoThe article is poorly researched. Napoleon III's motivation was preventing insurrections, not improving health of Parisians or the smell of the streets. Haussman targeted areas favorable to guerrilla action from rooftops, to barricades, and to escape, which often happened to be the oldest in Paris. The new avenues down which a cannon could be fired from one of the city to the other during an insurrection, in a nice bit of unintended consequence, later made the job of the invading Prussians easier. Haussman's plans were opposed by a number of cultural figures, including Baudelaire, who believed the loss of a great number of medieval buildings was unconscionable.
- msellout 11y agoThe Catacombs was a public health issue. The older graveyards were full and bodies were rotting in the open. I can't remember if that also coincided with the collapse of a road into the tunnels underneath, but that was around the same time. +/- 100 years.
- entee 11y agoIt's easy to forget how a "historic place" is actually not that old. Cities are constantly changing, we'd do well to not let preservationist instincts always trump new development and changes for a more useful city. SF in particular should be more creative about finding ways to preserve neighborhood feel without making a suicide pact with the effective 3-stories-or-less limit in most areas.
- NN88 11y agoAtlanta needs one of those.
- msellout 11y agoWhat about the Beltline? Things seem to be going well in ATL.
- ePierre 11y agoFor people interested in what Paris looked like before it became the Paris we know, I strongly recommend to have a look at Vergue (http://vergue.com http://vergue.com), and especially at the work of photographer Charles Marville (http://vergue.com/category/Auteurs/Charles-Marville http://vergue.com/category/Auteurs/Charles-Marville) who was commissioned to take pictures of streets that were going to be demolished or completely renovated. Vergue is doing a fantastic job of not only renovating these photographs, but also provides a crazy amount of details for each of them (What were these posters about? What is that tool we see next to the entrance of that café ? etc.)… in French only, sorry :)
- chm 11y agoMagnifique. I've just spent 30 minutes perusing the website. I would pay good money to have access to a "live" VR exhibition of these old streets. Walking around Paris, in two different eras.
- languagehacker 11y agoHaussmannize San Francisco!
- touristtam 11y agoI would recommend that 4 episodes tv program from the French-German channel Arte, if you can speak either language: http://boutique.arte.tv/f10552-paris_berlin_destins_croises_serie http://boutique.arte.tv/f10552-paris_berlin_destins_croises_... (this is the link for the french version).