Parsons Paris

October 25, 2020

Finding Inspiration around Campus

Emmanuel Cohen takes you on a short walking tour around the Parsons Paris campus at 45 rue Saint Roch, 75001. Watch the videos and read more below!

Paris is a formidable place to study art, design and … anything related to branding and marketing too! Some people might think that you need to be a student in architecture to really understand, see and enjoy the city. No matter how much you know about architecture, Paris is still hosting some extraordinary places where you can observe France’s cultural heritage dialogue with contemporary art, where movie sets welcome Parisians and tourists in mesmerizing anachronic living tableaus, where high fashion mixes with the statues antique carved draperies.

• Palais Royal

Built in the 1780 by Richelieu, the Palais Royal was conceived as a “village in the heart of the city,” with his garden à la française topped with a fontaine. The garden is encased in the center, surrounded by galeries hosting boutiques since its creation. It is considered as the ancestor of the shopping arcades or mall that became more popular with the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. On one side of the garden resides the Comédie-Française, the national theater house as well as an aisle of the Minister of Culture and Communication. On the other side, the Conseil Constitutionnel looms over the Louvre museum. This French institution created with the 5th Constitution of France is in charge of controlling the respect of the founding values of France by the laws voted by the Assemblée nationale (another magnificent building a few blocks away from Parsons Paris when walking in direction of the Seine river) and the Sénat.

Now, the Palais Royal is famous for its vintage clothes boutiques and high fashion brands, but also for its calm and quiet atmosphere in the heart of Paris. A must-see place around the school where temporary outdoor exhibitions and Paris Fashion Week events take place too.

• Colonnes de Buren

Situated on the South side of the Palais Royal, the Colonnes de Buren or “Deux Plateaux” got their name from Daniel Buren, a French contemporary artist specializing in painting, installations and most notably in situ art since the 1960s. In situ means “on site” or more specifically “site specific” in the context of contemporary art. It usually qualifies artworks that were conceived to honor, commemorate, or reminisce the audience of one or more particular aspects of a certain location.

For this underground series of 260 black and white marble columns sprouting from underground, and hiding a hidden fountain which runs a few meters below the surface, Buren got his inspiration from the geometric patterns suggested by the carved columns of the neoclassic architecture of the palais. It can also be seen as a visual reference of antic ruins that can be found in archeological sites, reminiscing the people walking by of the long history of Paris/Lutetia. 

• Passage Vivienne

Another location that bears a historical significance in relation to the industrial revolution and the mass production and consumption of manufactured goods. The concept of the “passage” has been analyzed by German thinker Walter Benjamin in Passagenwerk or The Arcades Project, an unfinished text written between 1927 and 1940.

Passages, or covered galleries that run perpendicular to main streets and housed bars, restaurants and small shops, were the ideal place for what romanticists called flâneurs, people strolling the streets without a clear goal in mind, just for the pleasure of discovering new things to watch and Parisian characters to observe. Most of the passages were destroyed by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s-1870s when charged by Emperor Napoleon 3, he redesigned Paris to be organized around broad avenues and harmonizes limestone buildings in order to prevent riots and barricades to be built in the narrow, sinuous streets of the old Paris. The commercial appeal of the passages was later overrun by newly built magasins de nouveautés and then grands magasins such as the well known Galeries Lafayette also 5 minutes away from Parsons Paris.

Le jardin des Tuileries

• Jeu de Paume

La galerie du Jeu de Paume or commonly called Le Jeu de Paume, used to be a sports hall where people played an ancestor of tennis, le jeu de paume, played with the palm of the hand and not with a racket. It  holds a central place in French History as it is the location where representatives of the three orders that existed in France prior to the Revolution (the Third Estate or Le Tiers État – the clergy or Le Clergé – the Gentry or La Noblesse) signed an oath in 1789 that cemented their will to reform France and its monarchy even if it meant them being arrested or worst. It is considered as one of the most important events that led to the Révolution française.

Now Le Jeu de Paume has been repurposed as a national gallery for contemporary photography. Some of Parsons Paris’ faculty have even exhibited their works there: congrats, AMT instructor Evan Roth for your participation in Le Supermarché des images. 

• Musee des Ars Décoratifs (MAD)

Parsons Paris students benefit from free access to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, also known as MAD, situated a few blocks from the main campus. There, you can observe design masterpieces from the Middle-Ages to the present. This specific museum sets as its mission to collect and preserve objects that embody high-end craftsmanship and techniques in order to make them accessible to the greatest numbers. In its library, you can read books in French and English on decorative arts throughout the world, on fashion design, object design or graphic design too. 

The library, whose windows open on the garden of the Tuileries (jardin des Tuileries), is the home of the collection Maciet, named after an art amateur and collector who set for himself the task of collecting as many images as possible from all types of objects and locations around the world to complement what writing could not capture through words only. With an impressive number of 5000 volumes composed from 1885 and 1911 – and enriched by the MAD curators from 1911 to 1996 -, the collection Maciet contains more than 1,000,000.00 pictures (reproductions of photographs, lithographs, and drawings) for you to expand your visual library of art, architecture, costume and fashion design (and much more!), the collection Maciet has a pinterest account.