Things look different from up there and far away, even in a city you live in or have visited many times. And sometimes, looking at it that way changes your whole view of what things are like and where they are.
Take the image above, made from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, with a telephoto lens that seems to squeeze out all the distance between Notre Dame, Sainte-Chapelle (spire to right of Notre Dame) and the dome of the Palais de l’institut de France.
From the Eiffel Tower, Les Invalides, foreground, and then left to right, Notre Dame, St-Germain-des-Pres, Ste-Sulpice and the Panthenon. Almost like a live satellite view on Google maps.
But the height and distance don’t just change the relative positions of what we see, they change our view of how things relate to each other. The three views of the Sacre Coeur Basilica on Montmartre, taken from the Eiffel Tower, emphasize its verticality and its separation from its surroundings in a way that street-level views never do. But the last image, made from a lower point, a balcony of the Musée d’Orsay, plunges it back into the city; the telephoto effect presses it against the world behind it.
At one distance, the Arc de Triomphe seems barely larger than its surroundings, at another, it is a feature so dominant that even its larger neighbors are diminished.
Unfortunately, sometimes a building can be dominant—and ugly.
Symmetry and asymmetry, angles and curves, each play a role in our mental image of Paris. The Champs des Mars, stretching behind the Eiffel, combines the symmetry and curves, as does the Palais de Chaillot, which faces the tower from across the Seine.
But the pattern of Paris, as recreated by Baron Haussmann with wide sweeping avenues and boulevards cutting across old neighborhoods, is largely neither symmetrical nor curved. Angles dominate as can be seen in the pattern of streets radiating from points such as Chaillot, the Arc de Triomphe and other focal points. A look down from the Eiffel Tower shows many variations of angles, tempered with the colorful variations of rooftops.
At a closer point, we can even have a hint of looking into windows and courtyards, almost sneaking up on people’s private spaces.
The picture below, with a long view down the river at dusk, reveals the spate of more recent buildings opting to curve their walls away from street lines and the angles of the past. Some do it well, and some… well…
Two recent buildings along the Seine, almost neighbors, break the mold for forms in interesting and different ways. Below, the Musée du quai Branly, which combines a number of collections into a major ethnographic museum; it combines gardens, glass and galleries on a large site. Behind it is a newcomer, the Russian Orthodox Spiritual and Cultural Center, funded by Russia and—loosely—modeled on traditional Russian Orthodox forms.
I had always looked at the Grand Palais, one of the major exhibition halls of the 1900 Paris world exposition, as a grand stone confection with a stately facade. Only from above did I realize it’s actually more like a giant shell or court topped with glass.
A privileged position: This statue, on a parapet of d’Orsay, always has a great view of the city.
This picture was the end of a sequence observed from the first floor of the Eiffel Tower; a crew arrived, assembled the rings, got the right people into the right places, and staged a ceremony: it was Sept 15 2017, and Paris had just been awarded the 2024 Summer Olympics.
