Tag Archives: Paris

“From Paris to Providence”

514 Broadway, the Prentice House, in Providence, where Anna and Laura Tirocchi had their dressmaking shop. Now known as the Wedding Cake House, it is a chic hotel. (Tirocchi Archive) Providence was once a world leader in textile manufacturing, including … Continue reading

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Stone carving jobs for youth

National Public Radio reported three years ago that the need for stone carvers to help restore the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, in Paris, following its fire in 2019, has caused schools teaching that craft to mushroom in France. These young people … Continue reading

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Latest wrinkle at Notre-Dame

Paris’s mayor Anne Hildago has announced a proposed visitors center in an abandoned garage beneath Notre-Dame cathedral. Since visitors centers are notoriously ugly, this one qualifies as an odd duck. Its location underneath the cathedral’s large plaza hides it away … Continue reading

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“Paris Without Skyscrapers”

There is an infinity of reasons why Paris should not build skyscrapers. Each street, each building, amounts to such a reason. You could say each citizen of Paris, each citizen of the world is a reason. But one reason I … Continue reading

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Notre-Dame falls to Disney?

Officials overseeing reconstruction of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame announced, on Sept. 18, that the landmark would open in time for the Paris Olympics in 2024. Good! However, the UK Telegraph has just run an article based on leaked plans to … Continue reading

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Mary Campbell Gallagher: RIP

I was saddened to hear of the passage on Monday, after a year-long illness, of Mary Campbell Gallagher, a leader in the fight against skyscrapers and other modernist architecture in Paris. Mary was best known for her work as liaison … Continue reading

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See how form follows fiasco

I’ve just started rereading the late Peter Blake’s slender 1960 hagiography of French architect Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in Switzerland. A far better book on Corbu, as he is known by his many deluded admirers, is Le Corbusier: The … Continue reading

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Tall buildings all fall down

Is there something off-kilter about the photo above from a video sent to me yesterday by architectural theorist Nikos Salingaros? Yes, there is. At first I thought it was a video of Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis public housing project, all … Continue reading

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Mary Gallagher: Saving Paris

On Thursday, Mary Campbell Gallagher, a leader in the crusade to save Paris from skyscrapers, had an oped in Le Figaro, one of the capital’s leading newspapers in addition to Le Monde. With her permission I republish it as a … Continue reading

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“Building Notre Dame”

PBS has broadcast a brilliant documentary, “Building Notre-Dame,” on the construction, over some 800 years, of the cathedral in Paris. We all know that the building arose as the cutting edge of architecture in the Middle Ages, and that a … Continue reading

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