From a traffic island at the upper end of a big Parisian street, the view is of a symmetrical, spacious corridor of magnificent apartment buildings that culminates in a wide plaza with a guy standing triumphantly on top of a column. Despite the world’s strife, these blocks have reconciled their differences and humbly organized themselves in flawless repeated patterns, each ensuring that its roof, façade, and materials exactly match those of its neighbors. As far as the eye can see, no mansards or railings are out of place.
Every door’s height and window position are echoed along and across the street. Arcades lead to balconies that give way to three storeys of worn sandstone, which meet softly domed, lead-covered roofs punctuated every few metres by solemn, geometric chimney stacks. The buildings appear to have shuϮed ahead like a company of ballet dancers, aligning their toes to the same place on the pavement as though under the baton of a strict dancing master.
The dominant beat of the blocks is supported by subsidiary harmonic progressions consisting of lamps and benches. To the visitor or responsive occupant, this spectacle of precision conveys a feeling of beauty associated with traits of regularity and uniformity, leading one to conclude that the concept of order is at the center of a specific type of architectural magnificence. The street is the result of a particular human intelligence. We have a strong sensation that nature will never create anything with the coherence and linearity of this scene.
The scene presents us with an externalisation of our most rational and purposeful mental processes. We can imagine the commotion that would have preceded the peace that now prevails in this place: the stiϩing summer days that would have echoed with the pounding and sawing of hundreds of laborers. The materials that make up the street would have had to be gathered from all over the country over the course of years by a legion of suppliers, many of whom were unaware of their colleagues and all working under the direction of the same master planner. Stonemasons in quarries to the east and south would have spent months hammering their chisels in similar configurations, producing stones that would settle uncomplainingly beside their neighbours.
The street symbolizes the sacrifice required by all feats of architecture. The stones might have preferred to continue sleeping where they had lain down to rest at their geological bedtime 200 million years before, just as the iron ore of the balustrades might have preferred to remain lodged in the Massif Central under forests of pine trees, before they were coaxed from their somnolence along with a symphony of other raw materials to partake in a massive urban composition. An artisan’s cart would have traveled for days to reach the city, leaving behind a family and staying in cheap inns.
One day, a piece of piping could be quietly united on the second floor of an apartment block with a hand basin, making life undramatically but significantly more habitable. The Parisian street moves us because we see how starkly its characteristics contrast with those that color our life in general. We call it beautiful because we are so familiar with its opposites: in domestic life, with sulks and petty disputes, and in architecture, with streets whose elements have decided to ignore the appearance of their neighbors and instead cry out chaotically for attention, like jealous and enraged lovers.
This orderly street exemplifies the benefits of giving up individual freedom for a bigger purpose, where all parts contribute to the whole. Though we are beings prone to squabble, kill, steal, and lie, the street reminds us that we can occasionally control our baser instincts and transform a waste land where wolves howled for generations into a monument of civilization.