Architectural Association School of Architecture

The whole presentation of Haussmanian Paris seems rigidly static but also unsettling. It is easy to assume its demand for a linear organization, an ascending hierarchy, and roads perfectly dissecting the city until confronted at a human scale. This project is concerned with the struggle between Vision and Knowledge in Paris. What we know of it to be symmetrical, we can see is not. What we see is symmetrical we come to know is not.

The facade is no longer a face to the building but a divider of space. It is important that a building has its own integrity, its own clarity and its own sculptural and architectural quality. Within this enormous envelope of the building the different programs can be established almost like grottos or autonomous projects so that the buildings envelope plays it own role in the life of the city and answers all the demands that the context asks. There is no optical induction; there is only deduction by rules which have an axiomatic validity however much the work created by this execution has a tentative inconsequential look....It is the pursuit of intelligibility by mathematical means. The tradition is profoundly humanistic in import, for it involves the deification of the hu- man mind by reason of its mathematical prowess. to sculpt the absolute and the true. This physical example of a mental phenomenon allows us to see the invisible.