My thoughts are with the innocent victims, and their families and friends, of the horrific and cowardly events in Paris, France.
Image: The motto of the French Republic — Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death. courtesy of Hector Fleischmann, La guillotine en 1793, Paris: Librairie des Publications Modernes, 1908. Public Domain.
Paris is generally held to be one of the most romantic cities in the world. However, an increasing number of Parisian officials have had enough of love. Specifically, they’re concerned that the “love lock” craze that has covered many of Paris’ iconic bridges in padlocks may become a structural problem, as well as a eyesore (to some).
But, the French of all people should know better — love cannot be denied; it’s likely that banning locks from bridges may just move everlasting love elsewhere. Now, wouldn’t the Eiffel Tower look awesome festooned in several million padlocks?
From the Guardian:
With Paris’s bridges groaning under the weight of an estimated 700,000 padlocks scrawled with lovers’ names, campaigners say it’s time to end the love locks ‘madness’.
For some they are a symbol of everlasting love. For others they are a rusting eyesore. But now the “love locks” – padlocks engraved with the names of lovers – that line the rails of Paris’s bridges may have met their match, as a campaign takes off to have them banned.
The No Love Locks campaign, which includes a petition that currently has over 1,700 signatures, was launched in February by two Americans living in Paris who were shocked at the extent of the trend across the city. The idea is that by attaching the locks to a public place and throwing away the key, the love it represents will become unbreakable. However, with an estimated 700,000 padlocks now attached to locations across the French capital, the weight could be putting the structural integrity of the city’s architecture at risk.
Originally affecting the Pont des Arts and Pont de l’Archevêché, the padlocks can now be found on almost all of the bridges across the Seine, as well as many of the smaller footbridges that span the canals in the 10th arrondissement. On the most popular bridges the guard rails now consist of a solid wall of metal. In a testament to the popularity of the act, even Google Maps now denotes the Pont de l’Archevêché as “Lovelock bridge”.
“It’s so out of control,” says Lisa Anselmo, who co-founded the campaign with fellow expat and writer Lisa Taylor Huff. “People are climbing up lampposts to clip locks on, hanging over the bridge to put them on the other side of the rail, risking their lives to attach one. It’s a kind of mania. It’s not about romance any more – it’s just about saying ‘I did it.'”
While the reaction to the campaign from many people has been one of surprise, indifference, or anger: “We’ve been getting some hate mail over it, people calling us bitter old ladies,” says Anselmo, many have been supportive. Signatories on the petition – which includes many Parisians – cite the “dégradation publique” caused by the locks. The mayor of the 6th arrondissement, Jean-Pierre Lecoq, also supports their concerns, describing the love locks as “madness”.
“Since this walkway overlooks the Seine, and there are a lot of tourist boats that pass under it, any relatively heavy object falling from a certain height could cause a passenger an injury, or even a fatal blow,” he told RTL radio last August.
And, according to Anselmo, it’s not simply an aesthetic concern: “This isn’t just two Americans butting their noses in and saying this isn’t pretty,” she says. “The weight of the locks presents a safety issue. The Pont des Arts is just a little footbridge and is now holding 93 metric tonnes from the locks; regularly the grill work collapses. The city replaces it and two weeks later it fills up again. Sadly a ban seems to be the only way.”
The city council, evidently aware of the locks’ popularity with tourists, has so far resisted taking action, although concerns about the damage they cause to the architecture have been raised in the past and the authorities are said to keep a regular check on the pressure being placed on the bridges’ structure.
Information on the official website for Paris, while acknowledging the positive idea behind the locks, is less than enthusiastic about the reality of them, highlighting the damage they do and even encouraging tourists to send a digital “e-love lock” instead. It states: “If the tradition continues to grow in popularity and causes too much damage to the city’s monuments, solutions will be considered in a bid to address the problem.” Thankfully, they claim they will do this “without breaking the hearts of those who have sealed their undying love for each other to the Parisian bridges”.
It is not just Paris, however, where love locks can be found. Since the early noughties the trend has taken off globally with shrines visible in cities around the world, much to the bemusement of authorities who have been struggling to keep them at bay. In 2012 Dublin city council removed all the love locks on Ha’penny bridge, while threats to remove the padlocks on Hohenzollern bridge in Cologne were retracted after a public outcry.
Indeed, for those whose tokens of affection are in jeopardy, the idea of a ban is less than welcome. Ben Lifton attached a love lock in Paris last February when visiting the city with his boyfriend. “We didn’t plan to do it,” he says. “But there was a guy conveniently selling locks and permanent markers next to it, and so for a few euros we thought, ‘why not’. It’s a nice way to deposit something somewhere, and know (or at least hope) that it will be there if, and when, you ever return.”
He finds the prospect of a ban, “a bit sad”. He said: “Clearly there are some people who have gone through a messy break up recently on the Paris council, and they have a vendetta against happy couples.”
Adam Driver, who has also affixed a love lock in Paris agrees: “The bridge in Paris, near the Notre Dame cathedral, is almost entirely covered with locks of all shapes, sizes and colour,” he says. “You can hardly see the bridge underneath them all. I think the bridge looks great. It is a real thing-to-do in Paris. It’s iconic, and it would be a shame to lose all of those locks, which hold so many memories for people.”
Read the entire story here.
Image: “Love locks” on the Pont-des-Artes, Paris. Courtesy of Huffington Post.
These three locations in Nevada, China (near Hangzhou) and Paris, France, have something in common. People the world over travel to these three places to see what they share. But only one has an original. In this case, we’re talking about the Eiffel Tower.
Now, this architectural grand theft is subject to a lengthy debate — the merits of mimicry, on a vast scale. There is even a fascinating coffee table sized book dedicated to this growing trend: Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, by Bianca Bosker.
Interestingly, the copycat trend only seems worrisome if those doing the copying are in a powerful and growing nation, and the copying is done on a national scale, perhaps for some form of cultural assimilation. After all, we don’t hear similar cries when developers put up a copy of Venice in Las Vegas — that’s just for entertainment we are told.
Yet haven’t civilizations borrowed, and stolen, ideas both good and bad throughout the ages? The answer of course is an unequivocal yes. Humans are avaricious collectors of memes that work — it’s more efficient to borrow than to invent. The Greeks borrowed from the Egyptians; the Romans borrowed from the Greeks; the Turks borrowed from the Romans; the Arabs borrowed from the Turks; the Spanish from the Arabs, the French from the Spanish, the British from the French, and so on. Of course what seems to be causing a more recent stir is that China is doing the borrowing, and on such a rapid and grand scale — the nation is copying not just buildings (and most other products) but entire urban landscapes. However, this is one way that empires emerge and evolve. In this case, China’s acquisitive impulses could, perhaps, be tempered if most nations of the world borrowed less from the Chinese — money that is. But that’s another story.
[div class=attrib]From the Atlantic:[end-div]
The latest and most famous case of Chinese architectural mimicry doesn’t look much like its predecessors. On December 28, German news weekly Der Spiegel reported that the Wangjing Soho, Zaha Hadid’s soaring new office and retail development under construction in Beijing, is being replicated, wall for wall and window for window, in Chongqing, a city in central China.
To most outside observers, this bold and quickly commissioned counterfeit represents a familiar form of piracy. In fashion, technology, and architecture, great ideas trickle down, often against the wishes of their progenitors. But in China, architectural copies don’t usually ape the latest designs.
In the vast space between Beijing and Chongqing lies a whole world of Chinese architectural simulacra that quietly aspire to a different ideal. In suburbs around China’s booming cities, developers build replicas of towns like Halstatt, Austria and Dorchester, England. Individual homes and offices, too, are designed to look like Versailles or the Chrysler Building. The most popular facsimile in China is the White House. The fastest-urbanizing country in history isn’t scanning design magazines for inspiration; it’s watching movies.
At Beijing’s Palais de Fortune, two hundred chateaus sit behind gold-tipped fences. At Chengdu’s British Town, pitched roofs and cast-iron street lamps dot the streets. At Shanghai’s Thames Town, a Gothic cathedral has become a tourist attraction in itself. Other developments have names like “Top Aristocrat,” (Beijing), “the Garden of Monet” (Shanghai), and “Galaxy Dante,” (Shenzhen).
Architects and critics within and beyond China have treated these derivative designs with scorn, as shameless kitsch or simply trash. Others cite China’s larger knock-off culture, from handbags to housing, as evidence of the innovation gap between China and the United States. For a larger audience on the Internet, they are merely a punchline, another example of China’s endlessly entertaining wackiness.
In short, the majority of Chinese architectural imitation, oozing with historical romanticism, is not taken seriously.
But perhaps it ought to be.
In Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, the first detailed book on the subject, Bianca Bosker argues that the significance of these constructions has been unfairly discounted. Bosker, a senior technology editor at the Huffington Post, has been visiting copycat Chinese villages for some six years, and in her view, these distorted impressions of the West offer a glance at the hopes, dreams and contradictions of China’s middle class.
“Clearly there’s an acknowledgement that there’s something great about Paris,” says Bosker. “But it’s also: ‘We can do it ourselves.'”
Armed with firsthand observation, field research, interviews, and a solid historical background, Bosker’s book is an attempt to change the way we think about Chinese duplitecture. “We’re seeing the Chinese dream in action,” she says. “It has to do with this ability to take control of your life. There’s now this plethora of options to choose from.” That is something new in China, as is the role that private enterprise is taking in molding built environments that will respond to people’s fantasies.
While the experts scoff, the people who build and inhabit these places are quite proud of them. As the saying goes, “The way to live best is to eat Chinese food, drive an American car, and live in a British house. That’s the ideal life.” The Chinese middle class is living in Orange County, Beijing, the same way you listen to reggae music or lounge in Danish furniture.
In practice, though, the depth and scale of this phenomenon has few parallels. No one knows how many facsimile communities there are in China, but the number is increasing every day. “Every time I go looking for more,” Bosker says, “I find more.”
How many are there?
“At least hundreds.”
[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]Image: Tianducheng, 13th arrondissement, Paris in China. Courtesy of Bianca Bosker/University of Hawaii Press.[end-div]
Many cities around the globe are home to underground art movements — those whose participants eschew the strictures of modern day gallery wine and cheese, curated exhibits, and formal public art shows. Paris has gone a step further — though deeper, would be more correct — in providing a subterranean home for some truly underground art and the groups of dedicated, clandestine artists, hackers and art restorers.
Wired spent some quality time with a leading group of Parisian underground artists, known as UX, for Underground eXperiment. Follow Wired’s fascinating and lengthy article here.
[div class=attrib]From the BBC:[end-div]
The obsessively secretive members of an underground art collective have spent the last 30 years surreptitiously staging events in tunnels beneath Paris. They say they never ask permission – and never ask for subsidies.
We’re standing nervously on the pavement, trying not to feel self-conscious as we furtively scrutinise each passer-by.
After weeks of negotiation, we have a meeting with someone who says he is a member of the highly secretive French artists’ collective – UX, as they are known for short – outside a town hall in the south of Paris. It is late on a Sunday night but the street is still quite busy.
Finally I notice a young man dressed entirely in black apart from a red beret and a small rucksack on his back. He hovers for a moment and then motions us to follow him. Our destination is the catacombs, the tunnels that run beneath the pavements of Paris.
A few minutes later Tristan (not his real name) and two companions are pulling the heavy steel cover off a manhole. “Quick, quick,” he says, “before the police come.”
I stare down a seemingly endless black hole before stepping gingerly on to a rusty ladder and start to clamber down.
There are several more ladders after that before we finally reach the bottom. To my great relief, there are no rats – we go deeper than the rats ever do – but it is pitch black and very wet.
The water is ankle deep and my shoes are soaked through. “It’s fine, if you’re properly dressed,” laughs Tristan as he splashes ahead in his rubber boots.
Using the flashlight on my phone, we do our best to follow him. Along the way I notice some colourful graffiti and a painting of an evil looking cat.
After a few minutes, we reach a dry, open space with intricate carvings on the wall and it is here that we finally sit down to interrogate our mysterious companions.
Tristan explains that he gets a kick out of getting to places, which are normally off-limits. He is a “cataphile” – somebody who loves to roam the catacombs of Paris.
UX are not the only people who go underground. There is a rap song about cataphiles, people who would rather don the rubber boots of a sewer worker (egoutier) than go clubbing in a normal night spot.
There have been a number of raves underground – some chambers are said to be big enough to hold 1,000 people.
The galleries are turned into makeshift night clubs, with a bar, lighting effects, and DJ turntables, using electricity diverted from the Parisian metro.
He also climbs on the roofs of churches. “You get a great view of the city, especially at night and it’s a cool place for a picnic,” he says.
Tristan who is originally from Lyon says his group is called the Lyonnaise des Os – a reference to the piles of bones (“os” is French for “bone”) in the catacombs – but also a pun on France’s famous water company, Lyonnaise des Eaux. He and his group spend their time exploring the tunnels, and carving sculptures.
The UX are a loose collective of people from a variety of backgrounds. Not just artists but also engineers, civil servants, lawyers and even a state prosecutor. They divide into different groups depending on their interests.
The Untergunther specialise in clandestine acts of restoration of parts of France’s heritage which they believe the state has neglected. There is also an all-women group, nicknamed The Mouse House, who are experts at infiltration.
Another group, called La Mexicaine de Perforation, or The Mexican Consolidated Drilling Authority, stages arts events like film festivals underground. They once created an entire cinema under the Palais de Chaillot, by the Trocadero, with seats cut out of the rock.
[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]
[div class=attrib]Image: Hacker-artists below Paris. Courtesy of Wired / UX.[end-div]