Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light (7 page)

Laid out in 1670 by Louis XIV’s royal architect Le Nôtre, the so-called Triumphal Way runs west from the Louvre’s Cour Carrée through the glass eye of the pyramid and nearby Carrousel Arch, across the Tuileries and up the Champs-Élysées, under the Arc de Triomphe, straight across town to La Défense, crowned by Mitterrand’s Grande Arche. My subway train covered the distance in twenty minutes. Even though from La Défense’s highest point I couldn’t see back into central Paris, I knew the Triumphal Way, alias the “Power Axis,” was there, also extending east from the Louvre to the Bastille.

Unexpectedly the Grande Arche is the sole Mitterrand project to have garnered near total support at the time of building. It actually improves La Défense, a paragon of architectural mediocrity bristling with mirrored-glass skyscrapers and studded with concrete apartment bunkers. The absence of cars, and recent landscaping, are the saving graces of this Moscow-meets-Manhattan satellite city.

As I queued under the Grande Arche in the windy vortex comically termed a “piazza,” then rode to the roof in a glass-bubble elevator, I recalled watching back in the late ’80s as the viewing deck was poured into place at a height of more than 300 feet (100 meters). Building the arch required much engineering wizardry. The vistas from on high aren’t nearly as spectacular as those you see from the Eiffel Tower, but if you’re into cannon-shot perspectives you won’t be disappointed.

Arch designer Johan Otto von Spreckelsen adroitly poised his bauble 6.30 degrees askew, mirroring the skew of the Louvre’s Cour Carrée without blocking the Power Axis. In theory a superhuman bowler could roll a ball through the arch’s wind-tunnel piazza to the grubby panes of Pei’s pyramid. At a distance of twenty-some years this sounds like manual self-pleasuring, but it long preoccupied Tonton’s planners.

A nitpicker might carp about the arch’s smog-stained Carrara cladding, the threadbare carpets inside, or the prison-camp aesthetics of the rooftop terrace. Even arch devotees cannot help noting that the suspended canvas windbreaks called “Nuages” look less like the hovering clouds Von Spreckelsen had envisioned than a tattered and stained Bedouin tent. They simply don’t work. Wind or not, the arch is standing up to time’s weathering, and it seems a pity that Von Spreckelsen died before it was completed.

A lesser archway, this one clad with sparkling dark granite, graces the entrance to the Bastille Opéra at the historic axis’s eastern end. Of all Tonton’s arch-follies it has aged the worst and despite constant upkeep looks, though barely into adulthood, like a shabby, overweight old cocotte who sometimes wears a hairnet. The netting comes and goes, depending on the danger level. It was in place for a decade or more to prevent the shoddily anchored gray granite cladding of the building from falling onto passersby. Millions of euros were thrown at the problem in the 2000s and by 2010 most of the perilous parts of the exterior had been replaced.

The reasons for the Bastille fiasco are now clear. In a rush to make a July 13, 1989, bicentennial celebration deadline, but desirous to appear fair this time around, Mitterrand held a “blind” competition for the project. Everyone in Paris soon knew that the president’s choice was remote-controlled by associates who mistakenly believed they had identified star-architect Richard Meier’s opera-house mockup. The fruit of this cock-up is Canadian-Uruguayan Carlos Ott’s $350 million monstrosity. It measures nearly half a mile (800 meters) around and 150 feet (48 meters) high. “People don’t like my opera house because they say it’s ugly, it’s fat, it doesn’t have any gold or red velvet inside, and it looks like a factory,” a red-faced Ott told me in 1989. “And all those things to me are compliments!” Ott has received many compliments since
Newsweek
first compared his masterpiece to “the alien mother ship that spawned the public toilets.”

However, as I bustled into the behemoth with droves of elegant opera aficionados and enjoyed a tear-jerking performance of
La Bohème
, I had to admit that the main auditorium is a formidable resonating chamber (Ott had help designing it). The blue-gray granite walls, oak flooring, and black velour seats that seemingly disappear when the lights go down are as handsome and functional today as the building’s outside was, is, and always will be ridiculous.

A ten-minute walk farther east and I came upon Mitterrand’s unsung Ministry of Finance complex. When built it was Europe’s longest continuous building, a seeming leftover from Stalin’s USSR. It goosesteps in an “L” from the Gare de Lyon to the Seine at Bercy. I remember the spiel co-architects Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro gave the press in the late 1980s. The Bercy Métro-viaduct, they said, with its double set of white stone arcades, inspired their concept. Too bad the inspiration penetrated only as far as the architects’ highly active vocal cords.

Detractors quickly dubbed the $500 million trifle “futuristic,” “Stalinesque,” and “nightmarish.” Its defenses include a moat and a cubical citadel of glass (for private ministerial meetings). A hive buzzing with six thousand pen pushers, honeycombed with identical, modular offices, the complex sports color-coded signage devised to get drones through a synapse-stunning thirty-five kilometers of corridors. That’s twenty-three miles. When I first toured the building in 1989 my embarrassed PR guide lost her way on the sixth floor of Building C, panicked, and had to call for help. Little has changed, though nowadays Bercy is smog-stained and seems less futuristic or “intelligent,” as it was once called (meaning one hundred percent computerized). I walked through it now and was comforted to learn that the air-conditioning still turns off when windows are opened. In-house mail continues to arrive via something called “Télédoc,” a ceiling-mounted electronic shuttle system. The minister flies in by helicopter (there’s a landing pad on the roof) or splashes in by speedboat (to a high-security dock on the Seine). With synthesized voices the elevators tell visitors what floor they’re on. And countless people still get lost.

Before leaving, I peered from a window at the Palais Omnisports across the street from the ministry. This semi-subterranean, pre-Mitterrand 1980 sports stadium boasts multicolored tubular metal frames, glass walls, and a steeply pitched roof covered with turf. The building is proof that grass can grow at a sixty-degree angle. Parisian kids claw their way up it and slide down. Some graffiti-aficionados are less gentle. Years ago I noticed that someone had physically torn out chunks of turf to form the characters “¥” “€” “$,” thereby demonstrating a yen for yen (¥), euros (€), and dollars ($). YES! The people most likely to read this cryptic message were of course the bigwigs in the ministry building. Strangely, I realized now that the “YES!” could still be made out. The grass, like the permanently ailing economies of Europe, has never quite recovered from the savaging.

While enjoying a restorative dose of caffeine at a café outside the ministry’s moat, I asked the barman how the fortress complex had changed the neighborhood. Local businesses are profiting, he chortled. Real estate values have risen. “And who cares if it could be in Moscow,” he asked, jerking his thumb eastward. “The TGB is worse!”

Upstream I crossed to the Left Bank at Tolbiac and stood before the Incan plinth on which the National Library rises amid a forest of construction cranes. Local redevelopment is still under way after a quarter-century of jackhammering. The library’s catchy official name is “Bibliothèque de France, Site François Mitterrand.” But everyone calls this one-billion-plus-dollar marvel the TGB (Très Grande Bibliothèque), a play on the acronym for the TGV high-speed train. Whatever you call it, the library is
folie de grandeur
incarnate.

Subtle? From the Seine embankment the library’s four, three-hundred-foot towers of glass, designed to mimic open books on end, look like flying wedges poised atop a dance floor almost a thousand feet long. The wonderful brashness of it is startling, making the TGB possibly the world’s defining set piece of post-postmodernism.

Can kitsch be dangerous? I skittered on buckling planks of tropical wood in the windswept shadows of the towers. A search among caged holly trees rattling in the wind revealed an entrance; fortunately I’d been here before and vaguely remembered the way. The site’s hidden heart is a glassed-in subterranean garden the length of two football fields, accessed via a tilted, moving sidewalk. Reportedly Mitterrand envisioned this as the twenty-first-century cloister of a neo-medieval monastery, inspired by Umberto Eco’s 1980s bestseller
The Name of the Rose
(later a Hollywood blockbuster starring Sean Connery). Set in a monastery, the tale was still the rage at the time Mitterrand’s courtiers came up with the TGB plan. The French government actually contemplated hiring Eco as a consultant. Like the caged hollies, the gardens’ handsome red pine trees double as contemporary bondage art, girded by steel cables so they won’t crash through the windows.

Wind is not the only problem at the TGB. I still haven’t gotten used to genial young architect Dominique Perrault’s underground reading rooms, or his cleverness in storing books in glass towers, where retrofitted wooden panels block daylight. The original plan was worse: conveyor belts were to cross an open courtyard, exposing books to rain and sun. I stood now in the western atrium and had plenty of time to take in the view of leaking ceilings and plastic buckets extending almost seven hundred feet east. Hours can go by while you get a computerized pass then summon a book from a tower into a reading room half a mile away. Best of all is trying to exit: if your returned loan hasn’t been scanned back into the system, as happened to me, you can’t get out. Red lights flashed. The turnstile wouldn’t turn. Librarians and security guards leapt into action. Then Big Brother pushed a button somewhere and finally I was free to go.

Detractors have had so much fun running the TGB into the ground that, standing in it again after an absence of many years, I actually felt protective of the library’s bigness, coldness, and inefficiency. Gone are the early days when TGB employees held strikes against “inhumane working conditions” and a “fundamentally flawed computer system.” Certainly, the computerized miniature train that retreives books still sometimes goes off the rails, despite years and millions of dollars’ worth of fine-tuning. But strides have been made. The library’s other minor flaws—the leaks, diseased trees, cavernous architectural deadends, stifling air, dank—are nothing another billion euros and a few more decades of work can’t fix.

Most of all, thousands of French university students seem to love the TGB. It mirrors the spirit of our time, one bright young lady told me as we stood in line together at the snack bar. Proof of the students’ approval was obvious once I stepped onto the smoking deck, an outdoor enclosure at treetop level inside the cloister. Future Ph.D.s dressed almost uniformly in black gulped plastic cups of coffee, posed and puffed, looking much like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir might if dressed in twenty-first-century garb, with piercing and tattoos, and electronic equipment appended.

Why Simone de Beauvoir? The archetypal French intellectual, a trailblazing feminist writer whose life-partner was the supreme philanderer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, de Beauvoir smoked and drank herself to an early death. Accordingly, the recently completed suspended footbridge linking the TGB to the Bercy gardens across the river is named after her. It’s an elegant span. Depending on your point of view, and the way the light falls, the swaying Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir evokes a length of DNA, a wooden whale diving and surfacing, a centipede, or one of those delicious sea creatures Frenchmen devour while murmuring the poetic name
cigale de mer
—locust lobster.

From the smoking deck I leaned into the wind, bouncing across the Seine on the lobster bridge, turning and swaying back, all the while marveling at the construction cranes still dancing overhead. Since the mid-1990s those cranes have been in action, and for just as long, some Paris newspapers and magazines have been touting the TGB’s nascent surroundings as “the new Marais” or “nouveau Quartier Latin”—meaning they will soon be hip, lively, and desirable places to live, work, and shop. Wishful thinking? True, the apartment houses are filling up with intrepid yuppies. A department of the Sorbonne—dubbed “Site Tolbiac”—has moved in (a decade late). A few hard-hitting contemporary art galleries have migrated, with their Marais minimalists and outer-arrondissement rebels, to Rue Louise Weiss and Rue des Frigos, across the tracks from the TGB. But few others have followed, and some galleries have given up waiting and have moved back to the Marais. Office towers, a research institute, additional upmarket housing, and a greenbelt over the rail yards are still being built. When will they be finished?

I asked a cheerful construction foreman. He repeated a line I’d heard on my first visit to the library in 1998, and again in 2000, 2005, 2008, and 2010. It may even have been spoken by the same construction foreman: “Tolbiac won’t be finished for another thirty years!” When pressed he admitted the job might get done in another twenty. This sounded like lifetime employment in an age of global insecurity and institutionalized recession. The developers’ slogan, confirmed the foreman, is still “Paris Awakens in the East.” Perhaps, I quipped, someone should brew stronger coffee.

Compared to the empty lots, railroad tracks, 1970s architectural triumphs, abandoned industrial sites, and defunct warehouses that formerly stood here, almost anything would be an improvement. Almost.

Down on the riverbank, I strolled along the landscaped Allée Arthur Rimbaud, wondering if the tormented poet of
The Drunken Boat
had liked the kinds of weepy, willowy trees planted here, and what he would have made of the TGB. One bonus of the riverfront re-conversion that Rimbaud, a walk-aholic, would surely have hailed is that you can now hike from the promenade bearing his name to the Latin Quarter on the Seine’s banks entirely unmolested by cars. That’s no mean achievement in a city as automobile-obsessed as Paris. Rimbaud, also an unrepentant party boy, would doubtless further enjoy the quayside hot spots fronting the TGB, which were not envisioned by Mitterrand. Moored there were half a dozen drunken boats—home to floating cafés, restaurants, and nightclubs.