So, too, with the glass phone booths, refined little structures that are light, crisp, and simple, or the sleek new traffic lights on the Champs-Élysées, or the freestanding structures of corrugated metal containing public toilets, or the fully automated cars with all-glass fronts on the new Météor line of the métro, where station platforms are separated from the tracks by glass walls that silently slide away after a train arrives. There’s nothing that radical about any of these things, but they wouldn’t get past the bureaucracy almost anywhere else, and when you look at them together, they give you the sense that in Paris the design of public places is taken as seriously as the making of public policy.
On one level, that’s always been the case. After all, this is the city that once commissioned Hector Guimard to design those extraordinary art nouveau arches—nearly as much a symbol of Paris as the Eiffel Tower—to serve as entrances to the métro, and that was about as avant-garde as you could get at the turn of the last century. Probably those round, green kiosks with the pointy domes, which confer a certain majesty on even the most routine posters and public announcements, were ahead of their time at some point, too. Public places here aren’t just highly styled, they’re inventive and different.
Parisians, who have always cared what things look like, have always believed in the grandeur of the public realm and in the ability of small, everyday things to affect the quality of life. Tiny details as much as great gestures have defined the look of Paris for more than a century: The street signs on the corners of buildings shape our sense of the city as much as the sweep of the Place de la Concorde; the rattan seats and tiny tables of the cafés work their way into our unconscious as much as the awesome scale of the Arc de Triomphe.
But for a long time—the years between World War II and the 1970s—nostalgia seemed to dominate creative energy, as if Parisians, or at least the architects who worked for them, feared that the cityscape that everyone so loved was too fragile to take on anything new, that it could only be respected by being preserved in aspic. But it was the worst kind of respect, since it implied that the image of the city was too frail to handle any change, a delicate flower that could not be expected to renew itself. And it suggested that the best future for the city was to freeze itself in time.
In some ways, you couldn’t blame people for thinking like that. What modernism there was in Paris during those years wasn’t the brilliant, cutting-edge work of great architects like Le Corbusier or Jean Prouve, but structures like the Tour Maine-Montparnasse, or the clusters of office buildings at La Défense and Front de Seine, clunky projects that had none of the grace, not to mention the sophisticated urbanism, that makes Paris what it is. When the Maine-Montparnasse skyscraper went up on the Left Bank, it made you wonder if the French, operating out of either cynicism or deviousness, hadn’t decided that the best way to show the world what they thought of America was to knock off the very worst of our architecture.
It was the Centre Pompidou, I think, that began to give modernism a good name in Paris. Nothing changed overnight in 1977, when Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s extraordinary high-tech cartoon of a building was finished—there would still be that awful underground shopping mall at Les Halles, suggesting that the French hadn’t quite finished copying American mistakes—but finally there was a contemporary building people were talking about in Paris that didn’t seem to have been put up to destroy the image of the city that everyone loved.
Then came Mitterrand’s Grands Projets, like I. M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre, which emerged from the belief that it was possible to create a modern equivalent to the monumental architecture that gives the city its opulent grandeur. Not all the Grands Projets turned out quite as successfully as the pyramid; almost no one, for example, has a good word for the ruthlessly nonfunctional new Bibliothèque Nationale. But at least Dominique Perrault’s design, which places books in four glass towers, doesn’t look like another refugee from midtown Manhattan. And the message these buildings sent as a group could not have been more clear: The new, the different, and even the experimental were to be encouraged at the very highest levels.
That is surely why the new office structure put up to house Paris municipal employees on the Quai de la Rapée beside the Seine, which was designed by Aymeric Zublena and opened in the early 1990s, doesn’t look like a typical office building but rather like a sleeker, even more high-tech version of the Centre Pompidou. Its main feature is an immense glass wall, seven stories high, that slides across the façade to open up the building for business each morning. Not quite as striking, but nearly as refined, is the nearby office building for the métro system, a crisp structure of glass and steel that is the perfect headquarters for the kind of subway whose new lines celebrate sleekness.
One of the most ambitious of the Grands Projets, if not one of the most beloved, is Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, in the northeast corner of Paris, an attempt to create a park that would express the complex realities, not to say the disconnections, of contemporary life. Tschumi eschewed picturesque landscaping in favor of a series of red-painted metal objects he called follies, which are open-framework structures that look vaguely like Cubist sculptures. The park is considered one of the high points of the deconstructivist movement in architecture, and if it came across more like a self-indulgent statement of architectural theory than a park that encouraged relaxation, it led the way to the more successful Parc André-Citroën, designed by landscape artists Alain Provost and Gilles Clément with architects Jean-Paul Viguier, Jean-François Jodry, and Patrick Berger. This time, the French tendency toward intellectualizing landscape design yielded something monumental, strikingly beautiful, and eminently usable, a park that both honors the French tradition of grand, formal open axial vistas (think Versailles) and goes beyond it to create a whole series of different kinds of landscape experiences into which a series of simple modernist structures are set. There is no illusion of rural naturalness here; this park belongs firmly in the French tradition of trying to order the world. As in the best work of Lenôtre, Parc André-Citroën manages to be both rigid in its order and deeply sensual in its form; it is a kind of miniature city of landscapes, utterly urban and yet in no way looking like the city.
Nearly as powerful in the way in which it uses landscape to enlarge the notion of urban experience is another project by Patrick Berger, the Promenade Plantée (also known as the Viaduc des Arts), on the Avenue Daumesnil, an abandoned elevated rail line that has been turned into a lushly planted, elevated walkway that runs through a whole neighborhood at the eastern edge of the city, just beyond the Opéra Bastille, another of the Grands Projets. It is a linear garden, a spectacular example of urban reclamation both on top, where the landscaped promenade gives you a sense that you are hovering over the city, and below, where the arches under the viaduct have been turned into antiques shops and restaurants. To walk on the Promenade Plantée is both to escape the city and to celebrate it.
The best thing about both of these new public places is the way in which they fit so neatly into Paris even as they completely reinvent the notion of the urban park. The newest architecture does the same thing and stands in total contrast to the modern buildings of the pre–Centre Pompidou years, which were entirely indifferent to the old urban fabric. The best new buildings fit in not by imitating the old but by respecting what really matters in Paris—the scale, the rich texture, and the orientation to the street.
A splendid new series of buildings throughout Paris includes neighborhood post offices and on-site housing for the postal employees. One such complex, by Frédéric Borel on the rue Oberkampf, is an intense combination of solids and voids that seems at once like a piece of abstract sculpture and a Cubist essay on the Parisian streetscape. At one of the smaller post offices, on the rue Castex, at the edge of the Marais, just before Place de la Bastille, a wonderful art moderne façade from a 1935 post office was retained and a new building incorporating the housing was built behind it.
All of
the ambitions behind the new public architecture of Paris come together in Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier, a gallery and headquarters for a cultural foundation on the boulevard Raspail in the Fourteenth Arrondissement. It is a glass box of exceptional elegance and lightness that is fronted by a series of glass walls that stand out at the sidewalk, like transparent fences. Between the walls and the building itself is a lush, somewhat untamed landscape that plays off against the glass. The whole setting is an essay in ambiguity, blurring the distinction between inside and outside, solid and void, material and ethereal. The building is monumental and grand, and yet it appears not to be earthbound at all but to be floating magically, transcendent like Paris itself.
March 2001
THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Patric Kuh
It was morning in Paris. In the cafés there was the hiss of milk being steamed for petits crèmes. By the Sèvres-Babylone métro entrance, in the Sixth Arrondissement, a city worker, in green uniform, hosed down the pavement, and two exquisitely dressed school-going children turned to wave to Maman, who was standing on the balcony of their apartment. Close by, where the rue d’Assas meets the rue du Cherche-Midi, in the second-floor kitchen of Restaurant Hélène Darroze, three chefs—Ariane Daguin, Anne-Sophie Pic, and Hélène Darroze, the restaurant’s owner—gathered to prepare a dinner that would stand as a testament to the two separate major influences on their careers.
The first was the culinary custom of the Mères Cuisinières. In a profoundly late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century tradition, women, often working at coal-burning stoves, usually a long way from Paris, introduced a simmered, domestic note into the rigors of French gastronomy. By remaining at the family restaurant for their entire careers, these women came to define the very place in which they labored, just as Mère Blanc did for the tiny hamlet of Vonnas, in the Bresse.
Juxtaposed with this continuity, the trajectories that had brought two of these three chefs and businesswomen to Darroze’s kitchen seemed like a study in contrasts. Mère Blanc, after all, never traveled to Paris with three assistants and two huge blue ice chests on the upper deck of the TGV. Mère Brazier never tipped a porter in Newark Airport to carry her seventy-eight-pound Styrofoam container of foie gras. And Mère Adrienne surely never welcomed anyone to her Montmartre restaurant wearing deck shoes and a valentine Swatch, and carrying a red cell phone that played Vivaldi when it rang.
The second major influence brought matters closer to home. The three women, ranging in age from thirty-three to forty-four, were all daughters of famed chefs, and the dinner, to which leading gastronomes, selected purveyors, château owners, journalists, and Mère Brazier’s granddaughter Jacotte had been invited, was also intended to be a tip of the toque to their fathers. The legacy of the Mères may have been elusive, but this one was concrete. Culinary traditions are passed on from generation to generation, though here there was a twist. Neither André Daguin nor Francis Darroze, who would be guests at the dinner, nor Jacques Pic, who died in 1992, had encouraged their daughters to pursue a career in cooking. But they had. When you’re a cook’s child, you get restaurants through the pores. You live by the tempo of a kitchen without being in one—the hour you play with your parent is between lunch and dinner, and the grazing good-night kiss that shouldn’t wake you comes at midnight. These women had gone out into the world, into different fields of study, only to find that their passion lay, as it had for their fathers, at the professional stove.
So there was both a maternal and a paternal side to the evening. Together, they represented a formidable undertaking. If the three women seemed somewhat sanguine, it may have been that as the daughters, granddaughters, and great-granddaughters of chefs, they understood that, in cooking, the greatest acknowledgment is getting a dish right. The three chefs, together with the assembled brigade, were intent on doing just that.
The kitchen itself was set up in the traditional French way, around a stove where cooks have visual contact with each other at all times. Just now, though, they had their backs to it as they worked. A young Greek helped Daguin stuff prunes marinated in Armagnac with foie gras mousse; Keren, from Jerusalem, cleaned gooseneck barnacles; and Sarah, from Poitiers, cut the chorizo made by Pierre Oteiza from free-range pigs that roam the Basque country eating chestnuts. The newest arrival cooked spinach for the staff lunch, nervously lifting it with a spider into a bath of ice water; a much more assured young man, who would soon be leaving for Michel Rostang’s restaurant on Anguilla, seared pigeons that had been marinated in olive oil and piments d’Espelette on an old freestanding grill.
This magnificent piece of equipment, with twin flues and the manufacturer’s name embossed on its shutters, had been brought up from the Darroze restaurant in the Landes when it closed in 1999. “In winter there, it’s dead these days,” Hélène Darroze said as she tried to explain the closing of a restaurant that had been owned by the same family for generations. With its burning coals, the grill seemed a monument to a France that no longer existed, for it conjured a time when restaurants depended, not on seasonal visits from international gastronomes, but on the itineraries of the traveling salesmen known as VRPs.
These salesmen (voyageurs représentants placiers) headed out on Monday morning and returned home on Friday night. The prestige of the restaurants that lined the roads they traveled are proof of the quality they expected. Hostellerie de la Poste, Hôtel de la Côte d’Or, and Lameloise lined Route Nationale 6; Point and Pic took care of Route Nationale 7. As Ariane Daguin spread foie gras mousse over cured duck breast, she recalled the bargains they expected, and how they played one restaurant against the other. “The salesmen would say, ‘Hey, the coffee is included chez Daguin,’ or ‘At Darroze, they give you the Armagnac.’”
Those were the days when Daguin’s grandmother took over the central courtyard of the Hôtel de France once a year. She would set up pans and cauldrons, and all the local farmers would bring their cèpes. The farmers would sell them, and the grandmother spent the day sautéing and putting them up in Mason jars to use until cèpe season came around again.
As such rituals were left behind, the past in which they had occurred took on a certain luminosity, creating an indefinable, bucolic image of the nation that the French warm to easily. Because the theme of the evening and the names involved brought it into graspable focus, the dinner had garnered a lot of media attention, including a crew from France 3 television.
From one point of view, the unapologetic promotional goals of the evening had already been achieved. But the charged atmosphere constituted the total opposite of what cooking can mean, and that tension seemed particularly acute for Darroze’s chef, Jean-Marie Baudic. A veteran of Pierre Gagnaire’s restaurant, he was about to open a restaurant of his own in his native Brittany. This was clearly the meal against which whoever succeeded him would be measured. For Baudic, the dinner was a succession of tiny details he carried in his head, and not one of them was going to get lost.
In between herding his blue-aproned corps from one task to the next, he prepared one dish for which he took a special responsibility: poached salt cod that would be served with cockles, the gooseneck barnacles, the chorizo from Basque pigs, and piquillos in cast-iron casseroles. His job now was to prepare the poaching oil. In a large copper sautoir he heated about three inches of olive oil, enough to brown a few handfuls of garlic slivers. This was simply to perfume. When it had cooled a little, he threw in bay leaves and sprigs of thyme, which would infuse the cooling oil for the rest of the afternoon. The morue—lovely thick, white fillets—was from Martín Berasategui, the Michelin three-star chef near San Sebastián. “I’ll poach it slowly,” Baudic said, his hands moving gently, like a conductor leading an orchestra through the most pianissimo of passages. “Just on trays above the stove, until it’s all infused and the fish is à la nacre.”
The term describes the color of mother-of-pearl. It is precisely the color that perfectly cooked salt cod should be, and in using it Baudic touched
both on the infinitesimal gradations of temperature on which great cooking depends and on the central paradox of the evening: Nothing may be as timeless as French culture, but nothing is as time-dependent as French cuisine. As a cook, he had his priorities right. Later that night, evoking the eternal glories of poplar-lined roads would be of no use if this beautiful cod wasn’t served pearly white.
By six P.M.,the kitchen was working at a quickened pace, and faces became slightly drawn. The sommeliers had whole cases of various white wines opened on the kitchen counter. They tasted each bottle to see if it was corked, using ice buckets as spittoons. Cooks did what cooks always do before big events—they ran the execution of dishes through their heads and stashed towels. Baudic looked approvingly at a metal tub filled with pigeon blood, made from the liquefied hearts and livers. The deep color would be good for the final sauce. “The pigeons were strangled,” he said, playfully testing the limits of a visitor’s curiosity. “It means their organs stay filled with blood.”
Darroze’s parents had arrived. Her mother had been set up in the dining room with an iron and the long white aprons with seven blue stripes (representing the seven provinces of the Basque country) that the cooks would don at the end of the meal. She ironed them while trading salty stories with Daguin. In a suit and tie, Francis Darroze waited in his daughter’s cubbyhole office and reminisced a little. He remembered doing the tasting rounds with Frank Schoonmaker, and he remembered, laughing, how his father got ortolans past U.S. customs for Henri Soulé to serve at Le Pavillon. Then he looked at the cooks working. “I don’t come into the kitchen often anymore,” he said. “One feels powerless.” He shrugged, “Eh bien, one cooks at home.”
Remembrance of Things Paris Page 33