Paris, Paris: Journey Into the City of Light by David Downie Read Free Book Online Page B

weathering, and it seems a pity that Von Spreckelsen died before it was completed.
    A lesser archway, this one clad with sparkling dark granite, graces the entrance to the Bastille Opéra at the historic axis’s eastern end. Of all Tonton’s arch-follies it has aged the worst and despite constant upkeep looks, though barely into adulthood, like a shabby, overweight old cocotte who sometimes wears a hairnet. The netting comes and goes, depending on the danger level. It was in place for a decade or more to prevent the shoddily anchored gray granite cladding of the building from falling onto passersby. Millions of euros were thrown at the problem in the 2000s and by 2010 most of the perilous parts of the exterior had been replaced.
    The reasons for the Bastille fiasco are now clear. In a rush to make a July 13, 1989, bicentennial celebration deadline, but desirous to appear fair this time around, Mitterrand held a “blind” competition for the project. Everyone in Paris soon knew that the president’s choice was remote-controlled by associates who mistakenly believed they had identified star-architect Richard Meier’s opera-house mockup. The fruit of this cock-up is Canadian-Uruguayan Carlos Ott’s $350 million monstrosity. It measures nearly half a mile (800 meters) around and 150 feet (48 meters) high. “People don’t like my opera house because they say it’s ugly, it’s fat, it doesn’t have any gold or red velvet inside, and it looks like a factory,” a red-faced Ott told me in 1989. “And all those things to me are compliments!” Ott has received many compliments since Newsweek first compared his masterpiece to “the alien mother ship that spawned the public toilets.”
    However, as I bustled into the behemoth with droves of elegant opera aficionados and enjoyed a tear-jerking performance of La Bohème , I had to admit that the main auditorium is a formidable resonating chamber (Ott had help designing it). The blue-gray granite walls, oak flooring, and black velour seats that seemingly disappear when the lights go down are as handsome and functional today as the building’s outside was, is, and always will be ridiculous.
    A ten-minute walk farther east and I came upon Mitterrand’s unsung Ministry of Finance complex. When built it was Europe’s longest continuous building, a seeming leftover from Stalin’s USSR. It goosesteps in an “L” from the Gare de Lyon to the Seine at Bercy. I remember the spiel co-architects Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro gave the press in the late 1980s. The Bercy Métro-viaduct, they said, with its double set of white stone arcades, inspired their concept. Too bad the inspiration penetrated only as far as the architects’ highly active vocal cords.
    Detractors quickly dubbed the $500 million trifle “futuristic,” “Stalinesque,” and “nightmarish.” Its defenses include a moat and a cubical citadel of glass (for private ministerial meetings). A hive buzzing with six thousand pen pushers, honeycombed with identical, modular offices, the complex sports color-coded signage devised to get drones through a synapse-stunning thirty-five kilometers of corridors. That’s twenty-three miles. When I first toured the building in 1989 my embarrassed PR guide lost her way on the sixth floor of Building C, panicked, and had to call for help. Little has changed, though nowadays Bercy is smog-stained and seems less futuristic or “intelligent,” as it was once called (meaning one hundred percent computerized). I walked through it now and was comforted to learn that the air-conditioning still turns off when windows are opened. In-house mail continues to arrive via something called “Télédoc,” a ceiling-mounted electronic shuttle system. The minister flies in by helicopter (there’s a landing pad on the roof) or splashes in by speedboat (to a high-security dock on the Seine). With synthesized voices the elevators tell visitors what floor they’re on. And countless people