The ability to construct complex social structures in the last few millennia empowered our species to dominate the planet. It was possible because of our ability to imagine and believe in common stories. Be it a story of religion or be it the story of capitalism, belief systems have shaped and held our social structures tightly. Nation Building is a process of seeding a new belief among the inhabitants, carving a new national identity for the progressive advancement of civilization. An identity that people within the nation could cherish and people without can look up to.
The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own, we have no soul of our own civilization.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Architectural footprints mould the nature of activities experienced by a social cluster. As it sculpts the cultural identity, it legitimizes a political society. In this way, architecture seeds a belief system in civilization, rooting its national identity. Creating a face of the nation, it also aims at harnessing the nation with economic stability.
Since the French revolution, France has been on a political rollercoaster. Where social beliefs were constantly changing the political ideologies, architectural attitudes were also moulding up. Paris being the capital of the nation, saw reflections on these shifts being implemented in the city silhouette. The remodeling of Paris in the 19th century welcomed a new architectural language to define the face of the nation. This changed the nature of interaction with existing monuments like Notre-Dame de Cathedral over the course of time. At the onset of globalization, the monuments like the Louvre Museum were incarnated with the modern perspective of the Louvre Pyramid. These monuments portrayed how Paris adopted new believes with the passage of time and constructed them into national identity.
“Notre Dame has evolved into a place where every French person can feel it belongs to them, whether they’re religious or not, and I think that’s the really key point: it has national meaning.”- Edward Berenson; Professor, New York University.
On the small island of the Seine River, rests the Notre-Dame Cathedral. Surviving French revolution and both world wars; the building stands in a gothic architectural style over 850 years. Following the footprints of architectural style, the structure has thinner walls, larger windows, and high pointed-arched vaults. These elements allowed the building to be lighter and higher, striking the stratosphere. Flying buttresses developed as a means of support allowed an increment in the width of the congregational space. Diffused light penetrating through rose windows gave a sense of connection with the new knowledge, promoting cultural values.
With a majority of the pious population in the city, the Catholic church had been the most dominant institution for centuries. It had a major influence on the cultural upbringing of people. Even the church leaders, being the legitimizers of political entities, held influential positions in all the critical sectors of the nation. With over 13 million daily footfalls in the church, it plays a major role in crowd pull and provides an original essence of the place, its culture, and its evolution.
In order to define a new identity of Paris post French revolution, the Emperor appointed Haussmann and a team of architects.
Paris needed light, air, clean water, and good sanitation
Napoleon III
There were several tasks in hand; Foremost was to stop the spread of diseases and build a healthy neighborhood by sanitizing the city. Concealing the open drainage under the paved road, the streets serve opportunities to hold voluminous and healthier gatherings. The second was restructuring the urban footprint of Paris from the grassroots. By connecting the major monuments, a new network of lanes and boulevards was fabricated, such that it provided better circulation and more accessible services. Later, these factors catalyzed capitalism and fuelled the industrial revolution.
The buildings were given a new order as limitations on building height, façade, and hierarchy of functions were laid. Short buildings brought more light to the streets; the neoclassical facades surrounding the boulevards brought a uniformity. With the ground floor reserved as a shop, each building under the common facade housed distant functions. Thus an architectural language was developed that soon became the face of Paris and still defines a part of modern France. Series of shops on the ground floor of the new typology altered boulevards into markets. Transforming the nature of social gathering along streets, lanes, public parks, and plazas, the new footprint of the city inscribed new values in the citizens that soon became rituals. Thus, an enriched culture was brewed.
Aiming for political stability, Haussmann gave central importance to religious, cultural, and political monuments. Buildings were constructed around such monuments and wide boulevards inter-connected these monuments. By equalizing the significance given of religious and political monuments, they attempted to legitimize their rule. With all urban planning, the city observed economic growth. The hierarchy of functions ingrained in the urban footprint helped the city to perceive and grasp hold of the movements like capitalism and industrialization. The face value of the city, spanning along the intricate neoclassical facades, rendered with the golden light of the sun attracted tourists by a huge sum. Literature and movies started capturing the beauty of Paris, it earned many titles.
Standing in front of the most visited museum and tagged as an architectural marvel, the Louvre Pyramid plays a vital part in Paris’ renowned cityscape. It alters the architectural language of Paris in terms of monumentalism and symbolism both at the scale of the museum and the city.
Reimagining the virtues of the Pyramid of Giza in a modern context, Louvre Pyramid was engineered at the top of an underground, yet torched lobby connecting the museum’s 3 pavilions- Denon, Richelieu, and Sully. It is also one of the most structurally stable forms, it marks a break with the architectural traditions of the past.
Promoting the ‘museum culture’ under the limelight of modernism, the pyramid uses glass with a desire to disappear in France’s mystic presence. As a significant material since the late twentieth century, glass has been famous for its transparency. Transparency symbolically relates to a democratic and transparent government.
Out of the multiple entry points to the Louvre museum, the most preferred one is that which is announced by the glass pyramid. Thus, defining the symbolic entry to the cultural resource of the nation, by modern measures of the Louvre pyramid, the modernist movement is harnessed in the fabric of Paris. Making it the work of our time.
In the want to empower the nation with economic prosperity and cultural enrichment, citizens practice nation-building. Sometimes, building a national identity is not a want, but a need. Disease moulds cities. Most quintessential developments in urban planning are developed reacting to the public health crisis. In order to bring sanitation to Paris, Haussmann and a team of architects were given the duty to remodel the cityscape. In a similar yet more severe manner, COVID-19 is joining a long list of infections that transformed lives in human history.
The COVID-19 pandemic has already notably reformed urban life. The number of people traveling around has dropped to unprecedented low surfaces. Many economic challenges would surface because of no tourist exposure. This might be the foundation that would revolutionize the way we practice architecture.
Briefly, Notre Dame Cathedral, Haussmann’s planning of Paris, and the Louvre pyramid contributed majorly to the direction of nation-building in their timeframe. Notre Dame cathedral played a humongous role in shaping the intellectual culture of Paris for eight centuries. The individuals residing in the city observed distinct impressions of the cathedral as time changed. It is an inseparable and substantial part of the city’s face and economy. The restructuring of the city fabric engineered social gatherings along the wide and luminous boulevards. Surrounded by neoclassical buildings on both sides, the shops on the ground floor of these buildings remoulded the socio-cultural practices.Louvre pyramid’s transparency portrays untold public-private relations. Even with maturing times, the pyramid solidly justified its existence, to an extent that it’s now compatible with the Louvre as the MonaLisa.
The construct of space that we dwell in restricts the nature of the activity and thereby governs our behavior in it. Thus, the role of an architect in such a case is to fabricate a neighborhood that is rooted in the contemporary meaning of the pluralist milieu. Such neighborhoods shape the nature of society and collectively such societies represent a nation. Hence, based on the Social-Cultural-Political stand of a nation, the role of architecture is to manifest a consensus derived belief system in the individuals by carving out daily experiences around essential spaces into habitual rituals observed communally.
Bibiliography:
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Graham, Emily E. “Notre Dame Has Shaped the Intellectual Life of Paris for Eight Centuries.” The Conversation, 28 Jan. 2020, www.theconversation.com/notre-dame-has-shaped-the-intellectual-life-of-paris-for-eight-centuries-115831
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