Your Cart

Paris Pour Memoire        Le Livre Noir Des Destructions Haussmanniennes

Paris Pour Memoire Le Livre Noir Des Destructions Haussmanniennes

Paris Pour Memoire Le Livre Noir Des Destructions Haussmanniennes

$45.00

Pinon Pierre.
Parigramme Paris 2012
SKU: S02521

In November 1851, the Administration instructed a young architect, Gabriel Davioud, to have surveys carried out on all the houses which were to be demolished as part of major works modifying the face of Paris. In order, it is specified, to preserve "at least the memory of the districts which will disappear".
A team of collaborators-architects is therefore put in place who, for three years, methodically takes sketches of the facades concerned with all the useful notations (colors, signs, shops ...), then reproduces and watercolors these drawings in the workshop. The company, commissioned by the same people who are preparing to cut old Paris to pieces, thus leads to the largest collection ever made of the destruction of the Second Empire and constitutes in this an exceptional document.
Unfortunately, these drawings are deposited in the archives of the City of Paris, which go up in smoke in the fires of the Commune in 1871. The destroyed houses will therefore have been twice, first, really under the pick and then, symbolically , by the flames. There remain the field reports, which Davioud deposited in the historic library of the City of Paris in 1877 ... and from which they emerge today for the first time as a whole.
This unpublished document will fascinate lovers of old Paris with its detail and will remain as the last trace of a ghost town, forever lost, deserted by its inhabitants but still showing its facades of the 17th and 18th centuries and the displays of its shops suddenly abandoned.

CL/  575 pp.  Many illus. of building facades.