June 6, Professor Ulrike Kasper & Haussman Architecture

For the fashion capital of the world, it's no surprise that Paris has re-invented her own image throughout the centuries. Today, Sorbonne faculty member Professor Ulrike Kasper guided us through a tour of the modern Paris designed by the civil planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who renovated the city under Napoleon III. In place of the cramped streets, sprawling dwellings, and archaic sanitation systems of Medieval Paris, Haussmann is responsible for its modern-day broad boulevards, as well as the Neo-classical design of the Opera Garnier and Arc de Triomphe. Ulrick led us through the long, covered passages or pavilions that house small shops and connect boulevards while circumventing the bustle of the Paris streets. These removed pavilions were imagined in modern novels and poetry as worlds apart, and spaces in which an individual might enter through one end as one person, and exit through another as an entirely re-imagined self. Leading us through many of these pavilions, and past the Louvre, and Royal Palace, Ulrich re-created for us the feeling of time-travel that writers she referred to must have felt, pointing out moments of architectural collision between old and new, and pointing out unexpected glimpses of an older Paris just beneath the surface. At the beginning of the tour, we all admired Paris as a beautiful city; by the end we had a greater appreciation for its multiplicity and capacity for transformation.