paris is for photographers

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while enjoying jason kottke’s beautiful photographs of paris, i was struck by several notions:
– north america will never be architecturally historical. our obsession with newer and better almost forces us to destroy things we deem as old or outdated in order to improve upon them. personally, i think this a failing, but i’m the minority.
– it appears there are no more than 25 people in all of paris. these 25 people spend most of the their time reading, walking leisurely along a river, selling produce or visiting museums. tourists don’t count, of course.
– notre dame makes me weep.
– parisian stencil grafitti rocks.
– obviously, there is no electricity in paris for not a single powerline obscures any of the breathtaking views.

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3 Thoughts on “paris is for photographers”

  1. derrick on February 20, 2003 at 23:53 said:

    your #1 is false. i can list off buildings in vancouver alone that have been given heritage designation, if you’d like. the impulse you describe was deemed a failing in the 70’s: hence, we still have the orpheum, hotel vancouver, the sun tower, the dominion building, the marine building, etc. etc.
    that impulse is still present, however, and my worry is that we’ll see ‘heritage’ as meaning only buildings from pre-1940, and they’ll come to represent, falsely, our whole architectural heritage.

  2. heather on February 21, 2003 at 07:44 said:

    they won’t last. north america is doomed to slash-and-burn that which they believe is old and decrepid. there may be pockets of heritage scattered about, but on the whole, it’s got to be the “next big thing”. bigger. better. newer. faster. slicker. more expensive.
    that being said, you’re obviously not taking my original point in the context of the photographs. look at them. do you ever think that cities in north america will ever remain that unchanging through centuries? do you actually think that we build anything with more than a 30-year life span? not so much. and especially less now than back when the hotel vancouver was constructed.
    it won’t last and we won’t have anything but a few scattered remains to remind us of what we left behind.

  3. Dor on February 21, 2003 at 13:47 said:

    that’s beauty of having different countries and different societies. if you like something better somewhere else, you have the choice to move there.

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