Sunday morning! Today's agenda, Rive Gauche (Left Bank,) within walking distance of the hostel and all pretty new to me. Jardin des Plantes seemed to have half of Paris jogging through it; it's a favorite spot for locals as it's relatively out of the way, and has some very nice natural history and zoological gardens.
I got free admission into the Museum of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy, which was unlike any other natural history museum I've been in. It's really hardcore--no interactive multimedia displays, no animatronic dinosaurs--everything was curated by 19th century naturalists, and hasn't been renovated. The only reason there was any COLOR in the building was because of the Darwin's 200th Birthday celebrations.
The key here is that it is the gallery of comparative anatomy, which means that the hundreds of skeletons on display are grouped according to species, genus, and family, At a glance, you can compare whales, manatees and walruses, look at humans side by side with the Great Apes, compare the skulls of all the Great Cats, or in some places directly compare the similarities between all the vertebrates, such as the hand structure of humans, bats, and dolphins. Incredibly educational.
The nearby French Pantheon has seen lots of troubles over its lifetime; completed just before the Revolution as the Church of St. Genevieve, it has been secularized and re-dedicated at least five times since then. Its current role is as a monument and mausoleum for great French heroes.
Voltaire and Rousseau are buried here, as are Victor Hugo, Marie Curie, Louis Braille, and champions of the French resistance in World War II.
Science buffs may be interested to hear that under the Pantheon's dome is where Focault installed his famous pendulum, to demonstrate the rotation of the Earth. Now that all the bickering over turning it into a church has finally settled, the pendulum has recently been reinstated.
On my way toward the Seine, I was compelled to stop at Jean Nouvel's Institute du Monde Arabe (Institute for the Arabic World,) built to foster understanding and peace between the Western world and the Arabic world.
The building's southern facade is patterned like Islamic sun screening lattices, and serves the same function--but with a modern twist.
Each one of those little apertures is articulated like a camera shutter, and can iris open or close to allow more or less light into the building, controlled by light sensors mounted on the panel. Pretty cool, huh?
There's a rooftop restaurant with (yet another) stunning view of the city.
Crossing the river, I figured I was in the area and may as well stop at Notre Dame de Paris. See, now THIS is why I want to live in a city. People go their entire lives longing to see these kinds of places, and I
just happened to be in the neighborhood and so went in. It really doesn't get any better than that.
The remainder of the afternoon was spent at the Centre Pompidou, the prototypical collaboration between Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers that launched both their professional careers and architectural theories. Like the later Lloyd's building in London, they turned the normal building model (central service core, curtain walls) inside out (push all the service elements to the outside, leaving a great wide open space in the middle.)
Unique to the Pompidou though is that they also picked out the service elements in color: red for human circulation systems, blue for heating/ventilation/air conditioning, green for plumbing, yellow for electrical systems, and white for structural systems, with everything else (like emergency stairways) in dark gray. Current exhibitions are Kandinsky and Calder.
Well, that nearly wraps it up. My feet feel like they're worn down to bloody stumps, so although it's possible I'll go out again tonight it seems unlikely. Tomorrow morning I'll have time for the Luxembourg Gardens before my train departs, but that will be about it, I think. I can't believe I'm leaving already... feels like I just got here.
