On Paris

24 February 2012

Fin

As a famous pig once said, "That's all, folks!"

I wrote a while back about exploring and falling in love with the Musée Gustave Moreau, the house-museum devoted to the 19th-century painter. I went back during my last week in Paris, this time with a camera.

Just a modest little reading room...

The Cabinet des Dessins at the Louvre, where scholars study documents from the Louvre's archived drawings.

I can assure you that the preceding lobbies do nothing to anticipate this space. Imagine my surprise when I walked through the door!

Woodland Cemetery

While in Stockholm, I made a pilgrimage in the southern suburbs to the Woodland Cemetery or Skogskyrkogården. This cemetery was built over three decades and completed in the 1940s by Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, two of Sweden's leading twentieth-century architects. Architecturally, it represents these architects' shift from National Romaticism to a more modernist approach. It's also, of course, an extraordinary cemetery, the graves amongst pine forests that are criss-crossed by cleverly-laid out paths connecting funerary chapels. The spatial themes of the stand of trees forming an enclosure, or of a forest clearing---always open to the sky---recur in various guises; from what little I know, this has a special Nordic resonance. And for all the design's thoughtful control and indebtedness to historical forms, it offers a typically Swedish accessible simplicity.

Stockholm

I was in Stockholm a few weeks ago for some research, with plenty of time to sight-see.

I didn't know much about Stockholm before I went, but I was quite pleasantly surprised by how lovely a city it is. Having been a royal capital for centuries, it's more elegant, generally, than Gothenburg, but it shares with Sweden's N. 2 city a closeness with water and nature. Stockholm is spread out on an archipelago, so I always seemed to be crossing harbours and inlets, with boats everywhere. Parks---often on rocky hills jutting out of the landscape at random---seemed to be everywhere, too; apparently, the city's area is 1/3 water and 1/3 parkland, a beautiful, clean and relaxing setting for an otherwise grand pastel-coloured city.

The sky was quite dramatic too. I was there during the darkest time of year, of course, the sky black by 4:00 p.m. and the daytime sun very low in the sky even at its peak. The very clouds seemed to skim the horizon as they raced by, also; I don't know if this was just how they appeared under (or beside) the horizontal winter sun, or if it's typical of the Baltic winter, but it added to the peculiar impression of a very low firmament.

Much to my surprise, I realized when in Stockholm how much I missed cold winter weather around this time of year. The mild grey of Paris just doesn't cut it for me I suppose, while Stockholm's colder bite, though not quite like Canada's, felt more like December to me. That being said, there was no snow on the ground, although I was told that this year was milder than usual.

It's also a very calm city. Maybe the parkland and water reduces the city's overall density, or maybe it's the difference between Scandinavian culture and those I'm more familiar with, or maybe it was because it was winter, but while the streets were far from abandoned I often found them strangely quiet. I would sometimes turn several lonely corners before stumbling upon a busy, brightly-lit shopping street or a crowded restaurant. It was slightly surreal, and certainly a change from Paris.

Vaux-le-Vicomte

Vaux-le-Vicomte was built in the mid-1600s by Nicolas Fouquet, chief financier to Louis XIV. Legend has it that when the project was completed, Fouquet hosted a great party to which the king was invited. The king, having calmly taken in the supremely coordinated gardens and chateau, realized the extent of his financier's wealth and the degree to which Fouquet had surpassed the king in his own magnificence; the next day, Fouquet was arrested---while Louis XIV took on Vaux-le-Vicomte's architect Louis Le Vau, painter Charles Le Brun, and gardener André Le Notre to create Versailles.

The legend actually exaggerates certain events and motivations, but this chateau and garden certainly represent an important milestone in the history of French architecture that Louis XIV himself recognized.

The chateau is centred on the double-height oval salon (of which I didn't manage to get very good photos). The salon's ceiling would have had a fresco glorifying Fouquet's master the king, while the room itself projects out into the garden. The gardens are, of course, vast, with a very interesting use of level changes and surprise: A broad canal perpendicular to the main axis of the gardens only appears as one approaches, the grotto on the other side revealed to be farther away than it seemed from the salon. Huge bodies of water reflect the sky and, from certain perspectives, the architecture of the chateau.

It is as though these gardens are meant to question the visitor's sense of reality, while the chateau's stable presence reinforces the royal authority that is celebrated in the salon below the distinctive dome.

(The photos are from last September.)