Paris – Life In A Word

My son will complete the purchase of his first house next week. We’ve helped him mull over properties the last few months, scrutinizing everything from floor plans to foundations. But I always focus on whether a house has a formal entry or not. There’s something about a foyer that feels essential to me, as if to say, “Welcome!”. Apple must’ve felt the same way when they designed their flagship store in New York City. Welcome to Apple Fifth Avenue.

If you’ve been to an Apple Store (and who am I kidding here; we’ve all been to an Apple Store), you know they’re essentially a room of tables and shelves. You’re greeted up front, asked what brings you in, and directed to wherever you need to go. Apple Fifth Avenue, on the other hand, needs no greeters. Its dramatic foyer beckons you in all by itself.

Apple Fifth Avenue’s entry is a 32 ft. glass cube dropped into the middle of a plaza in downtown Manhattan. The adjacent skyscrapers make the transparent structure stand out even more. There’s no signage whatsoever; simply a large, suspended Apple logo inviting you to descend the elevator or elegant spiral staircase to the store itself (which is entirely below ground). It’s the same strategy employed by the Louvre in Paris, with its above-ground glass pyramid serving as the entrance to the museum’s lobby below.

Without this entry I’m not sure Apple Fifth Avenue’s design would garner much attention, yet there are other elements worth noting. The surrounding plaza is dotted with 62 frosted skylights, bringing welcome natural light to the retail space below. The plaza also hosts 18 “lenses” – reflective steel shells with glass tops – to give you peeks downstairs. In the store itself you’ll find several (real) trees, with seating incorporated into their circular planters.

Apple Fifth Avenue became so popular a destination that secondary entrances were added (two staircases in the plaza) and the square footage of the store itself was doubled.

One of the more interesting stories behind Apple Fifth Avenue’s design concerned the size of the entry. CEO Steve Jobs wanted a 40-ft. cube while the property owner insisted on 30. To bridge the gap, a full-scale mock-up was created and placed in the plaza for Apple executives to see. The problem: Apple didn’t want to draw the attention of the public any more than they had to. So the mock-up was installed for just a couple of hours at 2 a.m. on a random weekday. When a 40-ft. cube was deemed too large (sorry, Steve), it was quickly disassembled to reveal a smaller cube inside – the size of the one you enter today.

It’s about time I included a NYC building in my posts on architecture, wouldn’t you agree? New Yorkers know I had plenty of choices, like the Empire State Building, Waldorf Astoria Hotel, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and Grand Central Station. But those have been around a long time. Apple Fifth Avenue opened its doors less than twenty years ago, and is already in the top sixty on the list of America’s Favorite Architecture.

As I recall the houses we looked at with my son, some had no foyer whatsoever. You walked across the threshold and found yourself standing in the front room or living room. That’s no way to make an entrance, is it? Apple knows better. At most of their stores you get a greeter. At Apple Fifth Avenue you get a full-on welcome.

Now for the latest on LEGO Fallingwater…

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LEGO Fallingwater – Update #10 (Read how this project got started in Perfect Harmony)

We’ve placed the very last brick into place, closing the assembly manual on our ten-week construction of LEGO Fallingwater. 92 pages (or 100%, or 222 minutes) into the build, here is the final product:

The angle of this photo is intended to match the photo above so you can compare the model to the real thing. I want to label the model “crude” but how about “rudimentary” instead? The intricacies of LEGO models have come a long way since this one.

A note about missing pieces. As I worked through the final steps I realized a handful of pieces were missing. I write this off to a less-than-perfect mechanism doling out the pieces for each model (or was this done by hand?) The LEGO Grand Piano wasn’t missing a single piece out of 3,000+. The gaps aren’t obvious at a glance so we can still call Fallingwater complete. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

Now for one last nod to Frank Lloyd Wright…

Oak Park Home & Studio

It’s fitting to finish where it all began. Wright’s first design (of which he was the sole architect) was his own home, built just west of Chicago in 1889.

Frank Lloyd Wright Home & Studio, Oak Park, IL

The house’s style, “Seaside Colonial” (borrowing from similar designs on the East Coast) was Wright’s first experiment with the Prairie Style elements that would later come together in so many of his other designs. The exterior is grounded with brick and stone while the interior has a largely open floor plan. The barrel-vaulted playroom was built on a smaller scale; a deliberate nod to its young occupants.

The rapid success of Wright’s architecture practice allowed for the expansion of the house a few years later, including the large octagonal structure you see on the left (for drafting studios, offices, a library, and a reception hall). Wright wore all the design hats on this project, including the mechanical systems, lighting, furniture, and decor.

Wright’s Oak Park Home & Studio is a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public. Even better, you can take a walking tour through the nearby neighborhoods to see ten houses he designed that still stand today.

Some content sourced from the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation website, and Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

In the airy but over-aired romantic comedy Me Before You (2016), the dashing but damaged Will Traynor (Sam Claflin) laments bygone times when he refers to, “Paris. Place Dauphine, right by the Pont Neuf. Sitting outside the cafe with a strong coffee, a warm croissant with unsalted butter and strawberry jam.” Place Dauphine is not just a scene in Me Before You; it’s a real square in the heart of Paris. And it probably has Will’s cafe, thanks to the nearby river and central views of the city. Yet French cafes are growing scarcer every year. In fact, these quaint little gathering places are disappearing in droves.

If someone asked me to paint a scene from a French country village, I’d surely highlight a charming cafe on a cobbled central space, bursting with patrons. In the cafe, the proprietor would serve incomparable pastries alongside fine, pressed coffee. The room would swell with music and chatter; the locals swapping their work-day adventures before heading home to supper. The evening stopover in the cafe seems to me a staple of French culture.

So it pains me to read about closed doors on France’s rural cafes, according to a recent report of the Wall Street Journal. Sixty years ago, you would find over 200,000 of them liberally dotting the country. Today, there are less than 40,000. “Progress” – in its various forms – has forced the rural worker out of traditional French industries and into the big cities. Time once spent in the cafe is now given over to the workday commute. Adds a village mayor, “Without a cafe, a village is pretty much dead”.

Even though I’ve been to Paris, I can’t claim to have spent time in any of its cafes, not even the famed Les Deux Magots, where writers like Hemingway and Joyce were said to have gathered. And yet, I’ve still experienced authentic “cafe culture” (and I don’t mean Starbucks). On a trip to Ireland several years ago, my wife and I concluded our first day of sightseeing by ducking into what we thought was a small pub in downtown Dublin. Turns out the place was more “French cafe”, complete with black-and-white prints on the walls, candle-lights on the tables, and coffee, tea, and pastries to beat the band. We were so taken by the place we stopped in every afternoon for the better part of a week. Perhaps the most showstopping memory of all: we never saw a phone, tablet, or laptop. Patrons were there to gather and chat, or at least – in the case of a few loners – to lose themselves in a good book.

The French cafe is made all the more romantic thanks to the artist Vincent van Gogh. In 1888 in the southern town of Arles, van Gogh observed the play of a cafe’s lights against the nighttime sky, which inspired his painting Cafe Terrace at Night, the precursor to his unequaled The Starry Night.

Perhaps you recall France’s “yellow vest movement” a year or so ago, when protestors took to the streets to battle aggressive economic policies. Turns out the French cafes played a part in the melee. The government sought to impose an increased fuel tax to reduce the number of cars on the road. The protesters interpreted the tax as an impolite shove, to get more people to move to the big cities. In other words, less people in French country villages. And no people in French country cafes. Remarkably, one of the government’s concessions following the yellow-vest protests was subsidies towards small businesses. Perhaps the French country cafe is not dead after all.

Had I written this post two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have come up with much positive spin on this topic. But let’s face it, those of us “sheltered in place” right now yearn for social interaction (not social distancing). We want face-to-face again, not Facetime. We want the congregation, not just the church service. So perhaps there’s a silver lining to the current pandemic after all. When we return to “new normal”, my hope is we’ll have a newfound appreciation for gathering, instead of hiding behind our electronic devices. As well, my hope is my next visit to France will find the doors of French country cafes wide open again, just beckoning me inside for “strong coffee and warm croissant”.

Tag: Paris

Making An Entrance

Iced Coffee