Friday Fotos

City quote

“How’s anyone ever going to come up with a book or a painting or a symphony or a sculpture that can compete with a great city? You can’t. When you look around, every street, every boulevard is its own special art form.”

 - Gil in Midnight in Paris

Musée du Louvre

This past Saturday (August 10) was the 220th anniversary of the opening of Musée du Louvre. To celebrate, Lapham's Quarterly republished a letter by Harriet Beecher Stowe describing her first visit there. While the entire letter is worth reading, I particularly enjoyed this description:

The ascent to the picture gallery tends to produce a flutter of excitement and expectation. Magnificent staircases, dim perspectives of frescoes and carvings, the glorious hall of Apollo, rooms with mosaic pavements, antique vases, countless spoils of art, dazzle the eye of the neophyte and prepare the mind for some grand enchantment. I first walked through the whole, offering my mind up aimlessly to see if there were any picture there great and glorious enough to seize and control my whole being, and answer at once the cravings of the poetic and artistic element.

As you would expect from a great writer, she makes the place come to life, even if this simple letter home.

Remaking Paris

As part of a special issue on Infrastructure, The New York Times Sunday Magazine had Nicholai Ouroussoff take a closer look at Sakozy's plans for Remaking Paris. But, while article does a great job of imagining different futures of the City of Light, the highlight might have been a series of Naoki Honjo tilt-shift photos that you can see featured in this audio slide show.