Day 2_Paris

Paris has more than one avant-garde park.  Parc Andre Citroen is located on the site of the former Citroen factory and provides another interesting example of park design. One of the two landscape designers, Gilles Clement, designed 6 different gardens:  all the same scale and form, but each one different, highlighting a different color, planet, and sense.  I have taught about Clement's green or silent garden, but I only understood it from photos. It makes a world of difference to see design in person.  By the way, if you want to see gardens, it is too early in Paris.  Deciduous plants are only beginning to leaf out, with some bulbs not even fully up.  Even Monet's garden at Giverny is still closed for Winter.

Musee du quai Branly had not only an interesting garden, but its front elevation is a green wall.

Eiffel Tower was a madhouse with hundreds of people in line.  With the light rain today, wasn't worth the wait to see cloudy views.

The Musee d'Orsay provided my first bit of French attitude since I arrived.  I was firmly corrected by one of the security guards to begin each query with "Bonjour."  He refused to answer my question until I repeated "Bonjour" after him.  Inside, the Impressionist floor is being renovated.  The paintings are all available to be seen on the first and second floors (or 0 and 1 floors in France), but they are no longer in chronological order.  With an art history background, one of my favorite aspects about this museum was that it showed the evolution of Impressionism and Post-Impression chronologically.  Under the auspice of "making new connections of influences previously unseen," I find the new layout confusing.  Maybe that's just me.  The museum is still one of my favorites as so many of the art history class slides can be seen in person here:  Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Pissaro, Rodin...all the big guns.

Couple of other thoughts...My students are here to study architecture, landscape architecture and urban design.  Looking at hardscape, most paving in Paris is permeable such as d.g. and dry-laid stone.  However these surfaces are not altogether ADA (American Disabilities Act) compliant.  It's interesting to note that the only wheelchairs I have seen so far were at the museum.  The paving is one that is not compatible with wheelchairs, so most people use canes and crutches.  Another note:  if you google in France, all the typical sites come up in French like wikipedia, etc.   It takes quite a scroll sometimes to find the same site in English.  Should have been obvious to me, but I never thought about it.

Read an article before I left on an American expatriate who moved to Paris 20 years ago.  She hosts dinner parties at her home each Sunday evening.  I invited myself and met an interesting group of 20 others who were also there for dinner.  In that small group were 2 architects, one who works in Boulder, CO and knew 2 San Luis Obispo architects; a man who lives in Lake Forest Park, a tiny Seattle suburb where we used to live; a man who sees a foreign film each day rather than watch TV;  a former Los Angeles film producer; a retired Herald Press reporter, and the interesting list goes on.  What fun.  As mom always told me, "You better behave as we live in a small world....."