A publisher of tour guides has written to me to ask whether they can use one of my Paris photos in the next edition of their guide. I said yes, of course, but I do hope they straighten it up a little before they publish it:
It’s a little wonky, non?
Archive for the ‘Other cities’ Category
Photo
July 7, 2009Erratum
May 27, 2009When I said
Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.
What I really meant was
Not including London, Paris does human-scale street life…etc etc.
London is bigger, so there are more places where it doesn’t happen, but when it does, it’s as good as anywhere else’s. I was reminded of this yesterday coming through Brixton Market, which is still the most interesting place I know in London.
Paris
May 15, 2009…was still lovely, of course. We caught the sun on the first day and I realised I hadn’t been there in good weather since 1998. It makes walking with no particular purpose in mind much more appealing.
In my second, or maybe third, year at university, I wrote an essay about Haussman’s Paris, and the period between 1853 and 1870 when he, along with Napoleon III, was responsible for what amounted to a wholescale razing and rebuilding of large swathes of the city. Huge numbers of slum-dwellers were effectively banished; their homes replaced by shiny new apartment buildings which only the rich could afford to live in. This is still the main reason why Paris’s inner city, in the sense in which we use the term, is largely outside the city.
Anyway, one of the things Haussman succeeded in putting in place was a set of rules governing future development in the city, which meant that subsequent building projects have had to abide by the aesthetic rules devised during his period as Prefect of the Seine. As a result, one of the most immediately Parisian of images is the wide, tree-lined boulevard edged with elegant buildings of greyish-white stone, never more than five stories high. This is the Paris that Haussman defined, and it’s still there much as he envisaged it.
And yet, there’s more variation in Paris than you might think, and it’s the sudden differences as much as the general sameness which make it a beautiful city. Not just the Eiffel Tower and the Centre Pompidou, but the unexpected sights which lurk around every other corner: a flea market; a gloomy courtyard, usually occupied by a grumpy-looking cat; a carousel; a sudden sharp hill leading up, or down, to a new vista. Paris does human-scale street life better than any city I can think of off the top of my head, with the possible exception of Beijing.
And it has La Grande Arche de la Défense, which is really big and has a hole in it:
More photos here.
Gay Paree
April 30, 2009
I’m off for three days of eating, drinking, eating, walking and eating. I fall in love with Paris all over again every time I go, including the time when I went with both my siblings, and my brother had to come a day late because his passport had expired, and my sister got food poisoning and puked all the way home.
Have a lovely bank holiday weekend, unless you’re outside the UK, in which case just have a lovely weekend. Or is May 1 a holiday everywhere?
Taipei 101 revisited
February 22, 2009There was a programme on BBC2 this evening about Taipei 101, the counterweighted skyscraper I wrote about a few months ago. If you can endure Richard Hammond (who, separated from the others, is fairly inoffensive, though I prefer the wild-haired one and have no time at all for Clarkson), it’s worth checking out on the iPlayer. The show focuses on the various feats of engineering which went into the building’s construction, and I was pleased to discover that the story of the building is just as fascinating as the finished product.
It also has the world’s fastest elevator, which travels at the unlikely speed of 1010 metres per minute. I’ve had my ears pop in Japan’s fastest elevator, in the Yokohama Landmark Tower, but at a piffling 750 metres a minute it barely compares. (Though looking it up now I discover that it’s also the world’s second-fastest elevator.)
Anyway, I’ve never been to Taiwan, though I’d like to, so I don’t have any photos of Taipei 101. Instead, here’s a photo of the view from the top of the Yokohama Landmark Tower, reflected in a mirror inside the viewing gallery:
On top of the world
December 2, 2008This is interesting, if you are interested in skyscrapers. Or people.
Shanghai Tower
December 1, 2008After a series of stories about mooted and improbable mile-high buildings, it’s almost a novelty to read about one which is actually being built as we speak. The new Shanghai Tower will be a respectable 632 metres tall, making it the tallest building in China. What I like most about this story, though, is the way the illustrations make Shanghai look as though it’s either in space, or the future, or both.
A photo
November 13, 2008On a rainy grey November afternoon, I can’t help thinking of places I’d rather be. One of them is Hong Kong.
Good grief
October 20, 2008Heavens, quite literally, above.
Even the graphic makes me a bit dizzy.
Yet another tallest building in the world
October 9, 2008Soon, you won’t even need to get in a plane to join the mile high club, if plans for this unlikely-looking structure in Dubai go ahead (alright, it’s a kilometre high. That’s ONE KILOMETRE).
Here, courtesy of Device Daily, is a chart comparing it to various other buildings around the world. If you squint, you might just be able to make out Canary Wharf over there on the right:
http://devicedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/nakheel-tower-09.jpg
