Architectural Theory Review

ISSN: 1326-4826 (Print) 1755-0475 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ratr20

Paris: Between Measure and Event

Emma Jones

To cite this article: Emma Jones (2008) Paris: Between Measure and Event, Architectural Theory
Review, 13:3, 349-367, DOI: 10.1080/13264820802488317

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13264820802488317

Published online: 04 Dec 2008.

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 ATR 13:3/08

Paris: Between Measure and Event

EMMA JONES

The following paper aims to explore, in view of a study of writer Italo Calvino’s
description of the metaphorical city of Zaira, how the fluid relationship between
‘measurements of space’ and ‘events of the past’ is revealed through inhabitations
of a city, both real and imagined. The paper aims to do this by focusing on one
city in particular to illustrate this notion, the city of Paris. It explores a series of
understandings and articulations of Paris, both theoretical and practical,
spanning predominantly the era of the nineteenth century through to
Modernism. It is hoped that the theories articulated here will be read in light
of the ideas posed by Calvino’s evocation of Zaira, and will enrich an
understanding of the universal concept of the revelation of time in space within
the cities in which we dwell.

In Italo Calvino’s fictional meditation, Invisible Cities (1972), the city of Zaira is described by the
Venetian envoy, Marco Polo, to the great Emperor Kublai Khan, not by means of the presentation of
maps or drawings, nor by the recounting of facts, population counts and density patterns, but by the
spinning of a narrative. This narrative, as strange and elusive as the intrepid explorer himself is
portrayed, seems a befitting way of describing a city which in itself unfolds as a story for the one who
experiences it.

Zaira, Polo muses, is a city characterized by its ‘‘relationships between the measurements of its space
and the events of its past.’’ For example, every object described within Zaira is measured in space,
but also in time. The height of a lamp post horrifically recalls ‘‘the distance from the ground of a
usurper’s swaying feet,’’ the perfunctory dimension of a balustrade casts a line to a distant memory,
in which that same distance was traced by the feet of a furtive adulterer who once ‘‘climbed over it at
dawn.’’1

If Zaira is at once a narrative, revealing itself piece by piece in a manner congruent to the Venetian’s
tale, then it is also embedded in the ‘now,’ for a memory, once recalled, becomes part of the present

Corresponding author: Emma Jones, e-mail: ejon2472@mail.usyd.edu.au

ISSN 1326-4826 print/ISSN 1755-0475 online

ª 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13264820802488317
 Jones

once more. This is where the experience of Zaira differs from the narrative used to describe it, namely, a
story, with its linear sequence of beginning, middle and end, and a city, where time is contained
simultaneously within the built fabric itself. Thus, says the envoy Polo,

A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell
its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings
of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the
flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.2

Marco Polo is painted by Calvino as a subtle and gifted storyteller, using descriptions of Zaira to
communicate to the Khan the universal idea of the revelation of time in space within the cities in which
we dwell. It is precisely this theme that the following study aims to explore, in view of Calvino’s evocative
allegory, how the constantly evolving relationship between ‘measure’ and ‘event,’ or between ‘space’ and
‘time,’ is revealed through inhabitations of a city, both real and imagined.

The paper aims to do this by focusing on one city in particular to illustrate this notion; the city of
Paris. Paris has been selected in part because of the author’s continuing fascination for and affinity
with the city, but also due to its rich and well-documented urban history. This paper explores a series
of understandings and articulations of Paris; both theoretical and practical, spanning predominantly
the era of the nineteenth century through to Modernism. It is hoped that the theories articulated
here can be read and understood in light of the ideas posed by Calvino’s metaphorical description of
Zaira.

To distinguish evidence of Marco Polo’s revelations about the city of Zaira in the city of Paris, one may
become a calculated observer, in literary terms a flâneur of the city. The nineteenth century concept of
the flâneur, famously synonymous with Paris, proposes a means of understanding the relationship
between time and space in a city by immersing oneself in the chaotic motion of its daily life. The
writings of nineteenth century literary figures such as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin on the
subject also aid and enrich this understanding.

The term ‘flâneur’ is derived from the French verb ‘flâner,’ which means ‘to stroll.’ The flâneur of
the city can thus be thought of as an ‘idle stroller,’3 or, more humorously, one ‘‘who goes botanizing
on the asphalt.’’4 The flâneur of the nineteenth century was portrayed as a bourgeois dilettante
afforded both money and time for wandering, or an artist or writer seeking inspiration for his art.
The term, however, has since widened in use to incorporate the idea of any pedestrian who is both
observer and participant in the diverse street life of a city. Characteristically, ‘‘the flâneur abandons
himself in the crowd,’’5 yet ultimately finds himself alone, and he must remain thus estranged if he
is to observe his surroundings with a critical eye. The mid-nineteenth century French poet Baudelaire
linked this phenomenon specifically to the city of Paris and the practice of observation of Parisian
public life by the artists of the day, and the term has become synonymous with this particular city
ever since.

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The flâneur of the nineteenth century city, as understood by Baudelaire,

accepted the fragmented character of everyday life. Experiences of immediacy became intertwined
with those scenes on the street that tended to fragment one’s vision, to focus on the part. To
accept this constantly shifting scene, rather than look for someplace fixed, stable, and whole, was
to become involved in the life of the city.6

Baudelaire saw the ‘‘flea markets, the whorehouses, and the cafes’’7 of the city as chaotic components of
an unfathomable whole, all equally important in the true experience of Paris. The city experienced by
the flâneur was a fragmented city, fallible and changing. It was understood differently, as we will see,
from the ‘fixed, stable and whole’ urban visions of early twentieth century figures such as Le Corbusier
and Sigfried Giedion.

This vision of a ‘fragmented’ city open to infinite interpretation was also notably reflected much later, in
the 1950s, through a series of abstracted Paris maps presented by avant-garde filmmaker and theorist
Guy Debord for the 1957 ‘‘First Psychogeographic Exhibition’’ in that city.8 These maps represent a
psychological rather than a scientific charting of the urbis; they are a visual representation of
Baudelaire’s Paris. One map in particular, entitled The Naked City (Fig. 1), is comprised of certain areas
of Paris documented in existing maps, cut up and rearranged in a new formation. Between these
collages is a collection of haphazard arrows, charting potential journeys through the city. In his analysis
of Debord’s maps, David Pinder writes:

they suggest possibility, encounter and even a fluid city to be navigated as if at sea, as they
indicated a loosening of daily binds and the flow of desire by breaking standard cartographic
procedures and charting other routes through urban space.9

The map represents a means of coaxing to the surface the hidden or inner life of the city—‘‘the marvels
that lay latent in the city’s dreamscapes,’’10 through the means of charting alternate ‘passages’ through
the city. Debord was to promise that, ‘‘One day we will construct cities made for drifting.’’11 Baudelaire’s
flâneur, understood in this light, is an explorer or a detective,12 with the psycho-geographic map as his
guide.

Walter Benjamin also calls this image of the ‘fluid city’ to light as a distinctively Baudelairean theme. In
an essay on Baudelaire, he writes:

The Paris of his [Baudelaire’s] poems is a sunken city, and more submarine than subterranean.
The chthonic elements of the city—its topographic formations, the old abandoned bed of the
Seine—have evidently found in him a mold.13

This sense of the ‘primal history’14 of a city working alongside its dazzling and constantly shifting
modernity is one the central identifying themes of his work, according to Benjamin. The ancient,

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Figure 1 Guy Debord, The Naked City, 1957. 33 6 47.5 cm. Source: David Pinder, Visions of the City:
Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism, Edinburgh University Press, 2005, p. 154.
ª FLC/ADAGP, Paris and DAGS, London.

submarine elements of the city reveal themselves like shipwrecks in the gloom, or, in the case of Zaira,
like ‘lines on a hand.’ They must be searched for, but the clues are there for those, like the flâneur, who
seek to read them.

Not only was Baudelaire’s Paris fragmented and imperfect but, as we have mentioned, it was also a city
in constant flux, since the flâneur primarily sees the city through the film of his desires, which are
impermanent. To further illustrate this notion, we may analyse a segment of Baudelaire’s poem, À une
Passante, in which the narrator, the flâneur, passes on the street a beautiful woman in mourning garb,
and describes the moment in which their eyes meet:

Graceful, noble, with a statue’s form.

And I drank, trembling as a madman thrills,
From her eyes, ashen sky where brooded storm,
The softness that fascinates, the pleasure that kills.

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A flash . . . then night!—O lovely fugitive,

I am suddenly reborn from your swift glance;
Shall I never see you till eternity?15

The flâneur, immersed within the crowd, singles the woman out from it as the embodiment of all his
desires in that moment. But the moment is fleeting, a fragmentary exchange—the woman passes by.
The flâneur interprets the stranger’s glance as a return of his desire, but he will never know for sure.
The moment has passed, and it is only what the narrator imagines that remains. The flâneur, it could
be said, experiences all he perceives of the city in this way. Every urban scene is interpreted through the
veil of desire, or what Pinder terms the ‘flow of desire;’ the flâneur sees only what he wants to see, and
what he wants to see may change from day to day, from mood to mood. The many phantasms of the
city formed by the mind and by desire are what fascinate him.

After Baudelaire’s death in 1867, writer Walter Benjamin, in his (uncompleted) homage to Paris, The
Arcades Project (written 1927-40), would famously link the idea of the flâneur with that city and more
specifically with the many glass covered arcades that had sprung up in the city during the capitalist boom
of the nineteenth century. As Benjamin discusses, it is in the Parisian arcades of this era that the notion of
the flâneur truly finds its apotheosis. The flâneur would stroll through these arcades, ‘‘observing the
people, the building façades, the objects for sale—entertaining and enriching his mind with the secret
language of the city.’’16 Nineteenth century urbanist Camillo Sitte betrayed a fondness for the kind of street
life to be found in the arcades by lamenting the steady loss, in the modern city, of ‘‘the unruly medieval
alley choked with animals, children and adults, for the square filled with stalls of fruit, spices, and meat.’’17

The flâneur’s perceptions of time, event and change as embodied in the fluid street life of a city would
be challenged with the arrival of modernism in the early twentieth century. Kenneth Frampton describes
Modernist architect Le Corbusier’s early urban visions such as the Plan Voisin as having a distinctly
‘‘anti street polemic.’’18 In 1929, Le Corbusier himself declared that, ‘‘The street wears us out. And when
all is said and done we have to admit it disgusts us.’’19 Architectural theorist Sigfried Giedion also stated
in 1941 that, ‘‘The first thing to do is abolish the rue corridor with its rigid lines of buildings and its
intermingling of traffic, pedestrians and houses.’’20

This kind of neutralization of the city, this removal of mixed uses by the abolition of the street, suggests
a ‘stopping up’ of the flow of time in urban space, and is what architects Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter
stood in opposition to in their book Collage City (1993). They sought something much closer to Sitte’s
vision of the medieval city, when they proposed, as an urban model, what they termed a ‘collage city.’
The collage city is a city in which layers of time and difference accumulate and are pasted together to
form complex interrelationships. The collage city is a record of ‘‘the impress of flux, the register of
things appearing, breaking, altering and messing up as they are used.’’21 As in Zaira, time is given form
in space by way of this layering of a ‘collage’ of built forms and the social interactions taking place
within and around them. Rowe and Koetter seek to restore the ‘fragmented’ city of flows, full of time,

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difference and change that once provided intellectual and spiritual nourishment for the nineteenth
century flâneur: the city as ‘‘a combination of new and old, an accumulation.’’22

The idea of the ‘collage city’ has been notably documented visually by the interpretations of two artists,
Fernand Leger, in his gouache image of New York circa 1935-40 (Fig. 2), and Australian artist Brett
Whiteley in his collection of images of Paris made in the year 1989, a series of what he termed ‘‘side
glances . . . split seconds of scribble.’’23 Leger, a French artist who was exiled to New York in the years of
the Second World War, paints the city as a collage of forms both decaying and new, with the statue of
liberty, the skyscraper, the industrial yard, the factory, etc., all documented as ‘‘things fragmenting in use,
with time revealed in the immediacy of the present.’’24 The components of the image, rendered without
perspective and often showing many sides of the object simultaneously as in a cubist portrait, jostle for
attention within the confines of the picture. This is no carefully measured conventional perspective, but
rather a visual representation of what the flâneur may be said to experience, the dynamism of a city taken
in all at once.

Whiteley’s collection of mixed media images, most notably the final image in the series entitled Paris
(summary) (Fig. 3), are imprints of moments
experienced, imagined scenes, photographs cut
out and pasted on the page, distorted perspectives.
Paris (summary), the final work created after
Whiteley’s return to Australia and a culmination
of all the studies made on the trip, is laid out like
a flâneur’s journey, its linear progression pausing
every so often to give way to an explosive,
hyperbolic icon or a miniature, carefully crafted
building study. The people lounging in the café
in the centre of the page are like ghosts; they are
drawn so faintly that they appear to move,
receding in and out of the café windows. The
Seine looms large in the foreground while Baron
Haussmann’s wide boulevards snake slowly
backwards, culminating in the tiny cut-out photo
of the Arc de Triomphe, perched like a crown on
top of the scene. The entire image is a vivid
impression of a journey through Paris, the fluid
and incalculable experience of time somehow
perfectly mapped in the non-linear sequence of Figure 2 Fernand Leger, 1 of 7 gouache studies for
spaces, looping in and around each other. an unrealized mural in New York, 1938-39. Source:
Carter B. Horsley, ‘‘Fernand Leger: The Museum of
Around this abstract pathway of impressions, Modern Art’’, in The City Review (Online), Available
beginning at a bridge over the Seine and at: www.thecityreview.com/leger.html

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 ATR 13:3/08

Figure 3 Brett Whiteley, Paris (summary), 1989. Mixed media on paper, 213 6 244 cm. Source: Brett
Whiteley, Paris ‘Regard de Côté’, Sydney: Australian Galleries Pty Ltd, 1990, plate 67.

culminating in the tiny Arc de Triomphe, lies only blank space. These areas of empty page seem to
suggest a city outside of the one Whiteley experiences, undoubtedly there but left unexplored by the
artist’s memory, like the abstracted arrows connecting the collaged spaces documented in Debord’s Paris
maps. This seems to reinforce the fragmentary nature of the city full of time—spaces that are dense
with line, shading and colour on the page are built from fervent rushes of memories, areas that are
sparsely covered are parts of Paris forgotten, or never seen. Time and memory are momentarily
glimpsed, revealing the detritus of a city and a civilization that is but fleeting, illuminated momentarily
in the manner described by Conrad’s Marlowe: ‘‘like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning
in the clouds.’’25 These flickers of memory are precisely represented in an imprint of the city.

Peter Caws discusses the idea of a time-layered city like Zaira in a talk he gave at the George
Washington University (2001). He cites Sigmund Freud’s celebrated work Civilisation and Its
Discontents (1930) in order to reinforce his own analogy that, ‘‘the unconscious is structured like a

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city.’’26 Freud presented the supposition, in Civilisation, that ‘‘nothing once formed in the mind could
ever perish . . . everything survives in some way or other, and is capable under certain conditions of
being brought to light again.’’27 To illustrate this concept of the in the human subconscious, Freud
takes the analogy of Rome, the Eternal City, as an example of the layering of memories set in stone:

Let us make the fantastic supposition that Rome [is] . . . a mental entity, that is, [one] in which
nothing once constructed had perished, and all the earlier phases of development have survived
alongside the latest . . . where the Palazzo Caffarelli now stands there would also be, without this
being removed, the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, not merely in its latest form, moreover, as the
Romans of the Caesars saw it, but also in its earliest shape, when it still wore an Etruscan design
and was adorned with terracotta antifixae. Where the Coliseum stands now we could at the same
time admire Nero’s Golden House . . . And the observer would need merely to shift the focus of his
eyes, perhaps, or change his position, in order to call up a view of either the one or the other.28

In this view of Rome, as in Zaira, time is ever-present, and revealed simultaneously in all the objects that
form the city, perhaps not as literally as this description suggests, but, like the human subconscious, there
all the same, hidden below the surface. The historian, in a very concrete sense, discovers time imprinted
on the stones of the city and beneath the ground and must interpret these findings. But the flâneur too,
like Freud, sees time revealed in the city through the filters of his perception. He imagines scenes,
conversations, glances, interactions, all having taken place or yet to occur within the panoramas of his city.

If Zaira is the ‘ideal’ city full of time, as is the city experienced by the flâneur, how might we imagine
the city that negates or denies time? To take the example of Paris once again, it is possible to begin with
the visions of the great urbanist Baron Georges Haussmann, commissioned by the nineteenth century
Napoleonic regime to implement sweeping planning reforms in the city, reforms befitting the status of
an Imperial Capital.

Haussmann’s vision has often been criticized, not least by Benjamin, who interprets Haussmann’s
methods of transforming Paris into an imposing capital as calculated acts of control, or even
destruction.29 Haussmann’s plans for wide, axial boulevards, always following the most direct route from
one point of gathering to another, the clear sight lines, the perfectly placed symmetry of the composition
of buildings, streets and squares, are all designed for maximum exposure of a gathering crowd. A
revolutionary mob (a great source of fear for the bourgeoisie of nineteenth century Paris) could easily
erect barricades in narrow, hooked and uncertain medieval streets from which they may fight their
oppressors, but under the new plan, as Benjamin states, ‘‘widening the streets is designed to make the
erection of barricades in Paris impossible, and new streets are to furnish the shortest route between the
barracks and the workers’ districts.’’30 In fact, Haussmann replaced 536 kilometres of old thoroughfare
with just 137 kilometres of new, more direct boulevards.31

However, in his quest to remove traces of the old Paris, Haussmann, according to Benjamin, ‘‘estranges
the Parisians from their city,’’32 and as the old quartiers are systematically dismantled to make way for

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the new, the inhabitants become aware of an increasingly ‘inhuman’ character. Walter Benjamin
documented this sentiment via quotes from articles, opinion pieces and publications of the time in The
Arcades Project. An example is given here from 1868, the same decade in which Baudelaire lived and
worked in the city:

From the Faubourg Saint-Germain to the Faubourg St Honore . . . from the Latin Quarter to the
environs of the Palais-Royal . . . it seemed, in each case, that you were passing from one
continent to another. It all made for so many distinct small cities within the capital city . . . all of
them nonetheless linked to one another by a host of gradations and transitions. And this is what
is being obliterated . . . by the construction everywhere of the same geometrical and rectilinear
street, with its unvarying mile-long perspective and its continuous rows of houses that are always
the same house.33

What is evident here is the fear of a loss of spatial flow, embodied by the ‘gradations and
transitions’ between the distinct and varied quartiers of the city built up over time. Indeed,
Haussmann’s unflinching policy of driving grand thoroughfares directly through the medieval city,
obliterating its narrow cobbled streets, squares and squalid tenement dwellings, may seem a
supreme act of destruction, a negation of the legacy of a city that may have held within its walls
a history dating back to the Roman Empire. But equally, it is difficult now, strolling down the
stately Haussmann creation of the Boulevard San Michel, to imagine any Paris other than the one
which currently stands, and it is probable that Haussmann himself, who, Benjamin asserts, ‘‘gave
himself the title of ‘demolition artist,’’’34 would not have envisioned an act of destruction, but
rather one of creation; the birth of an entirely new city from the rotten debris of the old, his own
phoenix from the ashes.

However alien, however ‘inhuman’ Parisians may first have thought of Haussmann’s acts, the new Paris
of his creation, the neutralized city, did not remain as such. Le Corbusier makes the observation that,
‘‘when he [Haussmann] began to cut Paris about so mercilessly, his contemporaries said it meant the
end of the city.’’35 But indeed, Parisians seem to have, over time, integrated Haussmann’s grand axial
boulevards into the very folklore of Paris, along with the city’s arcades and the once similarly
controversial (but now much loved) silhouette of the Tour Eiffel lit up at night. By the time Le
Corbusier released his bold scheme for Paris, the Plan Voisin, in 1925 (Fig. 4), Haussmann’s once
criticized urban scheme had already become a source of pride for the city’s inhabitants and Le
Corbusier’s proposal for its radical alteration provoked much criticism.

It was also Haussmann’s Paris that provided the stimulus for the strolling flâneur of Baudelaire and
Benjamin’s imagining. How could either of them have conceived of the idle Parisian in a setting
other than the one Haussmann had provided for him? A city that sought to dam the flow of time
had already become part of it; history once again visible in Haussmann’s new modern city to the
flâneur that chose to look for it—in the arcades, the tree lined boulevards, the shop windows, the
activities of commerce, the grand thoroughfares, the vistas.

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Figure 4 Le Corbusier, scale model of Plan Voisin, 1925. Source: Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 66.

Indeed, the experience of time in the urban spaces of Paris is linked directly to the city’s modernization,
brought about by Haussmann’s acts of destruction as well as of creation, the experience of which Baudelaire,
the archetypal ‘modern man’ in the street, sought to capture. The rapid urban changes and ideological shifts
of modernity brought to Paris a sense of the acceleration of time in the confusion of space, a sense of the
city experienced ‘all at once,’ the non-linear, rapidly changing structure of a dream or nightmare. Rather
than obliterating a sense of time, modernization appeared to enhance it. The city had become more
turbulent, more intense, more fluid than ever, and the focus of the activity was Haussmann’s boulevards,
now great arteries of commerce. How was it possible not to be overwhelmed by such experiences? Marshall
Berman exploring the relationship between modern man and the modern city, writes:

The great modernists of the nineteenth century all attack this environment passionately, and
strive to tear it down or explode it from within; yet all find themselves remarkably at home in it,
alive to its possibilities, affirmative even in their radical negations, playful and ironic even in
their moments of gravest seriousness and depth.36

The answer for Baudelaire was not to fight a fluid city, but to make himself at home in it. In his essay
‘‘Painter of Modern Life’’ (1859-60), he advocates the true modern man in the modern city must, ‘‘set

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up his house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of motion, in the midst of the fugitive
and the infinite.’’37 In other words, the chaos and dissonance of nineteenth century Paris may well
provide nourishment to those who embrace its contradictions. To survive and even thrive in the ‘fluid
city’ one must take Baudelaire’s example, and enter into the eye of the storm.

At the time of the development of the aforementioned Plan Voisin for Paris, Le Corbusier was
greatly influenced by historian and architectural critic Sigfried Giedion, author of the modern
manifesto Space, Time and Architecture (1941). Social critic Richard Sennett asserts that for Le
Corbusier, ‘‘the modern architecture Sigfried Giedion championed was a revelation . . . of the unity
of space and time.’’38 In his manifesto, Giedion states: ‘‘Space in modern physics is conceived of as
relative to a moving point of reference, not as the absolute and static entity of the baroque system
of Newton.’’39 This concept of being in two different places at once, facilitated by modern science
and also by new conceptions of speed and distance revealed by the new transport inventions of the
age, was understandably seductive to Giedion; it suggested an immediacy, a sense of the now, and
a new way of experiencing the world that could change the way a society viewed itself, not by
looking backwards into the past but by immersing itself in the richness of the present. Thus, if
modern physics had proved that in nature space and time have become interchangeable, might it
not follow that the same principles could be applied to architecture? Giedion believed that through
modern architecture space and time would achieve unity. The time-layered city would become
redundant.

This is not as abstract a goal as it may appear to be. Sennett, in The Conscience of the Eye (1990), gives
the example of the Administration building of the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne, built in 1914 by
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, as a building which, through its very form, sought this connection
between space and time—the experience of being in two different places at once. The use of transparent
walls in the building melts perceived barriers between spaces, between inside and outside. The planning
of the spaces invites sequential movement, as does the use of glass instead of heavy walls to reveal parts
of the building beyond, and in all rooms ‘‘the door, oddly not a barrier, invites you to enter.’’40 The
static spaces found in the buildings of the past are dismantled and broken down to enhance the sense of
spatial flow. According to Sennett, ‘‘Inside and outside, room and room, are unified, a unity we start to
experience the moment our bodies begin to move.’’41

Reflecting upon Giedion’s assertion that modern architecture could and would, mirroring nature’s laws,
achieve the necessary unification of time and space, it becomes increasingly possible that his utopian
urban vision may be reflected in a more metaphorical way, perversely, in the city of Zaira, the perfect
allegory for the ‘city full of time.’ Zaira, the city steeped in history, in essence the very city from which
twentieth century modernism sought to escape, is entrenched as firmly in the present as any city the
modernists may have imagined. In Zaira, time is measured by space, and space by time; they are not
separate but unified. In Freud’s representation of Rome, too, time is not a static, linear notion but ever-
present: ‘‘written in the corners of the streets . . . every segment marked in turn with scratches,
indentations, scrolls . . . ’’42

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Both Giedion and Le Corbusier dreamed of rational scientific thought giving birth to the supremely
rational city, a ‘‘city of chrome’’43 of ‘‘Cartesian skyscrapers,’’44 which, aided by the indispensable utility
of the modern machine, would provide an entirely new way of living, and so deliver a free, enlightened
society unburdened by the superstitions of the past. Einstein’s scientific revelations appeared to bring
these dreams of the ‘ideal’ city, the utopian city, ever closer towards realization. Rowe and Koetter, in
Collage City, discuss this in their chapter entitled ‘‘Utopia: Decline and Fall’’:

If the properties and behaviour of the material world had at last become explicable without
resorting to dubious speculation . . . it became possible to conceive of the ideal city of the mind as
presently to be cleansed of all metaphysical and superstitious cloudiness.45

Following this, the infallible laws of physics could be applied to anything conceivable, even the utopian
city, and the utopian city, existing always in the mind, could now, using technology and a perceived
mastery of the natural world, be made real: ‘‘Society and the human condition could be remade and
become subject to laws quite as infallible as those of physics. Then—and soon—it would no longer be
necessary for the ideal city to be simply a city of the mind.’’46

For Le Corbusier the New Architecture would produce not just a vision, but a reality: the first truly
Modern city. ‘‘Never to be wearied by age,’’ the new city would propose an ‘‘end to deception,
dissimulation, vanity, subterfuge and imposition.’’47 An end, perhaps, to the city experienced by the
flâneur, which is most if not all of these things. Most notably deceptive, because the city may reveal
itself, as we have seen for Baudelaire, in a manner that reflects only the dweller’s desires which are
fallible and subject to change; prone to subterfuge, because it enables one to become lost, or perhaps to
hide; and certainly dissimilar, because a city that accumulates over time must accommodate both the
new and the aged. This city, embodied by Calvino’s allegorical Zaira, through its simultaneous act of
both concealing and revealing the past in stone, is an uncertain, vague city, a city of ebb and flow that
appeared banished by the modern manifesto.

Additionally, it is difficult to imagine the presence of the flâneur (whose natural haunt is the
time-wearied street of Paris) in the modern city Le Corbusier dreamed of. This ‘idle stroller,’
whose very currency is time, who flaunts it and spends it indulgently, who both revels in and
laments its passing—where would he find his amusement in a city where time has little value?
Sennett writes,

Le Corbusier set himself against the ways in which time is usually felt in urban space. The
façades of old buildings and worn paving stones offer evidence that our own lives are no less than
an addition to the past. Le Corbusier rejected this evidence; he wanted a modern
architecture . . . to expunge historical time from the city.48

Le Corbusier did not necessarily seek the unification of time and space in a scientific or a metaphorical
sense, but sought to remove time from the equation altogether, to transcend it. His exploration of this

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notion produced the Plan Voisin, a radical proposal for a new urban centre, covering two square miles
of the Right Bank of Paris, bordered by the Seine. According to Sennett:

The Plan Voisin would have gutted the medieval quarter of the Marais, leveled it flat to the
ground. In the place of this thousand years of haphazard building, Le Corbusier would have
placed enormous x-shaped towers on a grid plan.49

Here again is the vision of rebirth of a city from its own destruction; the act of design so complete that
the haphazard record of human habitation over time has no right of existence.50 Indeed, the nihilism is
to be celebrated—for ‘‘that, properly speaking, is just what our work should be.’’51 For Le Corbusier, as
for Haussmann before him, this was a necessary consequence of progress. The totality of the vision was
what mattered: ‘‘the principle aim is manifesto.’’52 Urbanist Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (1961), decries this singularity of purpose and vision, its flaws exposed in the many
imitations of Le Corbusier’s dream that were built in its wake in the United States, such as low income
housing projects and office developments: ‘‘An imitation of Le Corbusier shouts ‘look what I made!’. Like
a great, visible ego it tells of someone’s achievement.’’53

Tied inextricably to this singular manifesto was the promise of freedom—freedom from the past, and
from the social problems thrown up continuously by the city of the present:

The desire to create is burdened by the belief one must in the process negate; indeed, the act of
creation produces an image of this denial, a picture of the very possibility of creating a blank
canvas, a clean emptiness—these spaces of negation which seem the promise of freedom.54

This negation of the past was rooted in the desire to enhance a sense of the now, as important for Le
Corbusier as for Giedion. The Plan Voisin is a mass-produced city, a city of repetition and uniformity,
and by destroying the city’s ‘‘differences which have accumulated in space,’’55 Le Corbusier is able to
banish the markings of time.

This drive to create endlessly anew, found in an analysis of Haussmann and Le Corbusier’s visionary
schemes and described by Sennett as the ‘‘rhythm of creation and negation,’’56 finds its parallel in
another of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the city of Fedora, where, in a metal building in the centre of the
city, is displayed an array of miniature Fedoras, each one representing a vision of the city that never
came to pass:

In every age someone, looking at Fedora as it was, imagined a way of making it the ideal city, but
when he constructed his miniature model, Fedora was no longer the same as before, and what
had been until yesterday a possible future became only a toy in a glass globe.57

Each of these miniature cities could have been the Plan Voisin, ‘‘a toy in a glass globe,’’ echoing Jacobs’
statement about Le Cobusier’s approach: ‘‘His city was a wonderful mechanical toy.’’58 As a scheme the

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Plan Voisin was a clear denial of the city that was, instead providing an unequivocal model of what Le
Corbusier believed a city could be. While the ‘real’ Paris, like the real Fedora outside of the metal
building, is a city in constant flux, its archetype remains unmoved, and it is the clarity that emerges
from this stillness, its completeness as an idea, that was immensely seductive to Le Corbusier’s
contemporaries.

The large part of its persuasive lucidity can be found in the way the scheme is presented. The towers,
often viewed from above in Le Corbusier’s drawings and models, are repetitive, impersonal, reflecting the
mass production of the perfect modern ‘machine for living.’ The renderings of the scheme give the
impression that the x-shaped structures, described by architectural historian Kenneth Frampton as ‘‘vast,
cruciform towers,’’59 could stretch out into the landscape forever in all directions, unchanging and
constant. In these renderings there are no people, and imperfection is obliterated ‘‘by positioning the
viewer so high in the sky, that it is impossible to seen much detail in his buildings.’’60 Le Corbusier’s
Plan Voisin appears triumphantly from out of the old city, which is ‘‘terrifying in its confusion . . . but
in contrast our city rises vertical to the sky, open to light and air, clear and radiant and sparkling.’’61

The flâneur experiences a relative city, where the eye perceives details, events, gestures, but never the city
in its entirety. This would be impossible, as the city that reveals itself to the flâneur is the ‘collage city’ of
Rowe and Koetter’s imagining—there is no whole and complete vision to be understood, only a series of
fluid experiences and connections which grow, converge and disperse. It is left to the flâneur to interpret
the city through the imperfect filters of his individual perception. The images drawn by Brett Whiteley
and Fernand Leger are images which reflect such an experience.

However, the panoramic vision or ‘birds eye view’ employed by Le Corbusier adds, according to Roland
Barthes in a short essay on the Eiffel Tower, ‘‘an incomparable power of intellection,’’62 given to us by
the ability to survey an image of the city in its (albeit abstract) entirety. In the objective renderings of Le
Corbusier the city is intellectualized rather than, as for the flâneur, ‘felt.’ The flâneur is immersed
within the city, but the viewer of the Plan Voisin surveys it from a great distance. If Zaira is a city where
every stone is a story, the images of the Plan Voisin evoke a kind of cold, still purity, an unsullied
neutrality that is akin to ‘‘the utopian illusion of changelessness and finality.’’63

Calvino’s fictional city of Zaira, understood as a conceptual relay between measure and event, prompts
an appreciation of Le Corbusier’s utopian vision as an attempt to redefine the ways time and change
make themselves felt in the urban spaces in which we dwell. The antagonistic relation between Zaira
and the Paris of Plan Voisin is hinged in respect of notions of embodiment of the time-layered, fluid city
and of the struggle against it. In a Paris that might be read through the lens of Zaira, the subtle
markings of time accumulate in stone and are revealed in precious fragments to those who search for
them, the slow walking flâneurs of the city. In Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin the measure is different.
There is a singular immediacy in the unveiling of an architectural vision in its entirety, one that is bold,
clean and new. Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin possesses the urgency of the ultimatum: ‘‘architecture or
revolution.’’64

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Of this singular purity of vision (which necessarily requires the banishing of time) Sennett writes:
‘‘Negation is a trap; like the young Le Corbusier, the artist can wind up representing only his own act of
denial.’’65 While the perfect city sits in its glass globe, gathering dust on a shelf, the city beyond its
boundaries ages, in a constant state of transformation and flow, erosion and reformation. The fabled
flâneur recognizes the necessity for change, for every observation of the city, every memory this
observation creates, is different from the last. It is because of this understanding that the evocations of
Paris as a fluid city in the writings of Baudelaire and Benjamin seem always to be imbued with a sense
of nostalgia and melancholic yearning.

Le Corbusier once remarked towards the end of his life, ‘‘You know, it’s life that’s always right and the
architect who’s wrong.’’66 The comment was made in response to the destruction of the architectural
consistency of his workers’ houses at Pessac (1925), which had over many years been altered and
reconfigured by the people who lived there. Le Corbusier’s reaction also suggests that the irony of this
paradox, illustrating the messy triumph of life over the ordered urbanism Le Corbusier strove for all his
life, was evidently not lost on the architect. The people of Paris had echoed the same adage, ‘‘it’s life
that’s always right,’’ in the reclamation and transformation of Haussmann’s sterile boulevards.

If Le Corbusier was able to recognize, through his experiences with Pessac, that even his purest visions of
the city had to accommodate the disordered and uncertain kind of existence experienced on any
Baudelairean boulevard, it is entirely conceivable that were the Plan Voisin ever built, the scheme in life
would have borne no resemblance to the Fedora-like glass globe city of Le Corbusier’s dream, the city
‘‘never to be wearied by age.’’

We may entertain the idea that the people of this new modern city may have at first felt displaced (as
Benjamin saw them for the first time in Haussmann’s nineteenth century Paris), unwelcome in a cold,
alien city of cruciform towers and chrome. But perhaps, over time, the inhabitants of the ‘new’ Paris
would have become used to their city, by the very act of living their lives imprinting it with strings of
memories like the invisible threads stretching between time and space described in the city of Zaira. It is
even possible that, with this layering of memory, the city would change its appearance over the years,
eventually becoming unrecognizable as the seemingly unpopulated city Corbusier first imagined and
drew from such a great height. If this were to happen, the nostalgia for a city felt once by writers like
Sitte might be keenly felt again, this time not for the medieval Paris, nor for Haussmann’s nineteenth
century Empirical Paris, but for Le Corbusier’s x-shaped towers, stretching out from the Seine, engulfing
the horizon.

When the character Marco Polo speaks of Zaira, or of Fedora, or of the many other cities he conjures for
Kublai Khan’s pleasure, Calvino is able to reveal to us that in essence, Polo is describing the many facets
of just one city, Venice, the envoy’s home. When Polo speaks of these many cities, in truth he speaks
only of the one. Venice is transfigured by Polo’s words, becoming the universal city. Equally, in a study
of Paris, one may interpret as universal those ideas that are principally inferred through the filter of
Calvino’s reading of the city. Notions of the intertwining of space and time in the fluid urban fabric of

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Zaira can illuminate a discourse on the understanding of time as revealed in space in Paris, and in all
cities—so long as they continue to accommodate the many and varied records of human civilization.

Endnotes
1 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, London: Random House, 1997, p. 10.
2 Calvino, Invisible Cities, pp. 10-11.
3 Collins French Dictionary, New York: Harper Collins, 2001, p. 185.
4 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Harry Zohn (trans.),
London: Verso, p. 36.
5 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 55.
6 Richard Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, p. 175.
7 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 123.
8 Guy Debord was a founding member of the Situationist International group of the 1960s, a movement which
became politically intertwined with the Parisian student uprisings of May 1968. The Situationists were critical
of the redevelopment of cities in line with the socio-economic dictates of capitalism, and viewed the urban
projects of Le Corbusier in particular as overly rational and socially repressive. The Situationist practice of the
dérive, or ‘drift,’ an experimental journey on foot through the city, sometimes documented as lasting for
months, can be linked closely to the experience of the flâneur through the way notions of time in the city are
understood. Both involve a rejection of the repetitive routines of capitalist urban life in favour of the freedom
of wandering the city at an undisciplined pace, tapping into the often imperceptible ebb and flow of the
currents between urban space, time and the human body. The dérive can be viewed as the physical
incarnation of the psychogeographic map. Simon Sadler discusses these ideas in detail in his book The
Situationist City (1998).
9 David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in Twentieth-Century Urbanism,
Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 153-155.
10 Pinder, Visions of the City, p. 156.
11 Guy Debord, ‘‘Theorie de la dérive,’’ the original version of which essay appeared in Les levres nues 9
(November 1956) and was reprinted in Gerard Berreby (ed.), Documents relatifs a la fondation de
l’Internationale situationniste: 1948-1957, Paris: Editions Allia, 1985, p. 316, and quoted in Pinder,
Visions of the City, p. 159. The essay was also published in edited form (without the final paragraph that
includes this quote) in IS 2 (December 1958): 19-23 and the edited version was translated as ‘‘Theory of
the derive’’ in Ken Knabb, Situationist International Anthology, Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets,
1981, pp. 50-54.
12 Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, pp. 40-41.
13 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, Rolf Tiedemann (ed.), translated into English as The Arcades Project,
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 10. The
quote also throws up allusions to the popular leisure activity in Benjamin’s time of the ‘touring’ of the
extensive underground passages and sewers of Paris by the general public, a means by which the ancient
subterranean city could be revealed in a very literal way as a hidden parallel to (or perverse reflection of) the
world above the ground.

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14 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 10.

15 Charles Baudelaire, À une Passante, C.F. McIntyre (trans.), in Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, p. 45.
16 Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2006, pp. 36-37.
17 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 176.
18 Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, London: Thames & Hudson, 2006. Running
concurrently to Le Corbusier’s distaste for the urban street was his development of the idea of the ‘rue
interieur,’ the ‘internal street,’ as seen in his design for the Unité d’habitation, Marseilles (1946-52). The
internal street was elevated from the ground, running through the centre of the apartment block and
providing access to the apartments and communal service areas. Most notably, this ‘interior street’ is a private
street; only those living in the building can use it. In this way Corbusier achieves his separation of uses: cars
are for the ground plane, pedestrians walk above. The appearance of the built form surrounding the internal
street is confined to a single period in time and controlled by a single architectural sensibility, that of the
architect himself. The Paris arcades also functioned as internal streets, but being essentially public spaces,
were forced to accommodate those differences in society that the private streets of the Unité were able to
exclude.
19 Quoted in Michael Dennis, Court & Garden, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986, p. 213. Quote is from the
article ‘‘The Street,’’ which originally appeared in the French publication L’Intransigeant in May 1929.
20 Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 5th edn, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982, p.
548.
21 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 176.
22 Dennis, Court & Garden, p. 208.
23 Brett Whiteley, Paris ‘regard de cote’, Sydney: Australian Galleries, 1990.
24 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 175.
25 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, VIC: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 8.
26 Peter Caws, ‘‘The Unconscious is Structured Like a City,’’ GWU Issue 2001: Selected Papers from the 6th
Annual Human Sciences Conference, Janus Head (Online), 2001, available at: www.janushead.org/gwu-
2001/caws.cfm.
27 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, in Robert Maynard Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the
Western World, Vol. 54: The Major Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952, p.
769.
28 Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents, pp. 769-770.
29 Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Exposé of 1935,’’ in Benjamin, The Arcades
Project, p. 13.
30 Benjamin, ‘‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’’ p. 12.
31 Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, p. 24.
32 Benjamin, ‘‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’’ p. 12.
33 Victor Fournel, Paris nouveau et Paris futur (Paris, 1868), quoted in Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 146.
34 Benjamin, ‘‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’’ p. 12.

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35 Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (1924), translated by Frederick Etchells as The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning,
London: Architectural Press, 1929, p. 267.
36 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York: Penguin Books,
1988, p. 19.
37 Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘The Painter of Modern Life’’ (1859-60), translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne in The
Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, Phaidon Press, 1965, quoted by Berman in All That Is Solid Melts
Into Air, p. 145.
38 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 170.
39 Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, p. 436.
40 Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, p. 104.
41 Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, p. 105.
42 Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 10.
43 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 170.
44 Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, p. 155.
45 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993, p. 15.
46 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, p. 15.
47 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, p. 4.
48 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 170.
49 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 171.
50 There are exceptions. In Chapter 15 of his written manifesto Urbanisme (translated as The City
of Tomorrow by Frederick Etchells), Le Corbusier does state that he wishes to retain certain fragments of
the ‘old’ Paris. He specifically mentions the ‘ancient churches’ and certain ruins or fragments of
important buildings as being worthy of preservation from demolition, and they are to sit within
parkland settings between the new towers. It is stipulated that these historical relics are meant to
function purely as static monuments to the past (or testaments to Parisian greatness). Still and quiet,
these parks are to be places of reflection. By Le Corbusier’s own admission, they are to be conceived of
as ‘cemeteries’ to a dead past, where the relics housed in them can be segregated and kept from
‘polluting’ the new city.
51 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, p. 284.
52 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, p. 72.
53 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1992, p. 23.
54 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, pp. 172-173.
55 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 173.
56 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 173.
57 Calvino, Invisible Cities, p. 32.
58 Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 23.
59 Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, p. 155.
60 Sennett, The Conscience of the Eye, p. 171.

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61 Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow, p. 280.

62 Caws (online), The Unconscious is Structured Like a City.
63 Rowe and Koetter, Collage City, p. 149.
64 Le Corbusier, Vers Une Architecture (1923), translated by Frederick Etchells as Towards A New Architecture,
London: The Architectural Press, 1927, p. 14.
65 Sennett, Conscience of the Eye, p. 174.
66 Cited in Charles Jencks, Le Corbusier and the Continual Revolution in Architecture, New York: Monacelli
Press, 2000, p. 144.

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