Rue de Fleurus. Central Paris has some of the most beautiful architecture anywhere (but don't get me started on the housing estates and some suburbs, which can be as ugly as anywhere...). Here in the bourgeois 6th arrondissement, across the road from where Gertrude Stein once lived with her brother Leo, and her partner Alice B Toklas, is proof that "even Paris" was not immune from examples of 1960s uglification!
It's kind of nice to see in a perverse way....otherwise you might walk around in a permanent fugue of Paris-inspired romanticism!
RIGHT!!
ReplyDeleteI don't mind if uglification goes on in empty blocks. After all, the 1950s and 60s were as entitled to their architectural tastes, as were the people of any earlier decade.
But I object bitterly if there was a perfectly beautiful, functional home there, built in the 18th or 19th century. Baron Haussmann's first goal, after all, was architectural unity.
I'm not that perverse.
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