Auguste Perret came from a family of building contractors and trained as an architect in order to bring the profitable work of design within the capabilities of the family business. This background gave Perret an understanding of how buildings are actually made, far outstripping that of most architects of his time. His buildings have all the classical rigour of his architectural training, combined with the structural logic and technical mastery learned within his family firm. (more…)

This Deconstructivist park was one of the architectural surprises of the 1989 bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution. Neither blatantly monumental nor symbolic, it was laid out over six years and designed to be delight and noting else. Ultimately the park, planted on the site of the former central Paris abattoirs, was to have been overlain with a grid of no fewer than 42 brightly coloured follies, each an enjoyably useless Deconstructivist design by Bernard Tschumi with intellectual input from the hip Deconstructivist philosopher, Jacques Derrida. (more…)

The Arc de Triomphe is the world’s largest triumphal arch, standing 51 metres high by 45 metres wide. Inspired by the Arch of Titus in Rome, it was commissioned by Emperor Napoleon I in 1806 after the victory at Austerlitz, to commemorate all the victories of the French army; it has since engendered a worldwide military taste for triumphal and nationalistic monuments. (more…)

In 1806 Napoleon commissioned Pierre-Alexandre Vignon, Inspector-General of Buildings of the Republic, to build a Temple to the Glory of the Great Army and provide a monumental view to the north of Place de la Concorde. Known as “The Madeleine,” this church was designed as a Neo-Classical temple surrounded by a Corinthian colonnade, reflecting the predominant taste for Classical art and architecture. (more…)

Ticino-born architect Mario Botta emphasized an integration between the space of the cathedral seen as the place where humans express their desire for spirituality, and the urban fabric of the city, where humans face the materiality of daily life. At Evry this integration is expressed through an architectural complex which consists of the cylindrical volume of the church and a lower building used for apartments and offices. (more…)

In this development of the pre-fabricated concrete classicism of St. Quentin-en-Yvelines, the Taller de Arquitectura’s idea of a Versailles for the people was taken to an even further extreme. Given the formless nature of the new Parisian suburbs – most are truly hideous and make one almost long for the Mock-Tudor and Neo-Georgian delights of Kingsbury or East Cheam – Bofill’s idea of creating a powerful architecture and a sense. (more…)