x:
y:
[10/09/2025]
Urban Axes
“Whenever artistic planning is discussed, it is always necessary to mention, sooner or later, Paris. It is here that just this balance between the aerial view and man-in-the-street view is attained.“ (Abercrombie 1919, 705) What the British architect and urban planner Patrick Abercrombie describes in his article published in 1919 as a peculiarity of the Parisian cityscape bears witness to its famous perspectives on street level and its aerial images as iconic motifs connected with Paris' pioneering role in aerial photography: while Nadar first photographed the French capital from a balloon in 1858 and then more intensively from 1868 (Gervais 2013), the platforms of the Tour Eiffel, erected for the Exposition universelle, were used for aerial photography from 1889 onwards. These rapidly disseminated images represent the conquest of airspace, indeed they “anticipated the aerial experience” according to Jean-Louis Cohen with reference to Siegfried Giedion (Cohen 2006, 9, Giedion 1928, 6–9). At the beginning of the 20th century, these aerial photographs were used as models by the painter Robert Delaunay to celebrate the geometry of the city as seen from above (Mondenard 2018). René Clair's 1925 film Paris qui dort begins on the Eiffel Tower and takes the protagonist down into the streets. In Clair's film, the view from above interacts with the view from below in that the camera first captures the aerial view of the Champ de Mars through a spectacular tilting movement (fig. 2), then it films the monument out of steel from base to top. In the 1950s, the photographer and pilot Roger Henrard expanded the compendium of photographic aerial views of Paris (sHenrard 1952; Cohen 2006), while from the 1960s onwards, television increasingly used aerial film footage in its coverage of construction projects in the région parisienne.
But let us return to Abercrombie and his emphatic statement from 1919 about the unique balance between street view and aerial view in the planning of the French capital: His observation immediately brings to mind Paris' famous perspectives and incisions in the urban morphology through street axes and perimeter block developments from the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century, as well as the axes of the well composed parks. While axes and street grids already defined the layout of Lutetia—the Gallo-Roman city from which the French capital developed—, the most famous axial parks of Versailles and the Parc des Tuileries date back to the 17th century landscape and garden designer André Le Nôtre under Louis XIV. Axiality symbolised the monarch's symmetrical ordering of nature and his watchful eye over his territory (Schweizer 2013). It is well known that the city prefect George-Eugène Haussmann, appointed under Napoleon III and in charge from 1853 to 1870, was responsible for drilling massive axial boulevards into the dense network of irregular neighbourhoods. It was not only a side effect, that the large boulevards made insurrectional barricades almost impossible. The axial transformations can be compared with earlier planning tendencies in Paris as well as with interventions such as those in papal Rome under Sixtus V at the end of the 16th century (Loyer 1992, 192). The so-called Haussmannisation promised a modernisation boost for Paris in the 19th century, which followed the principle of renewal through destruction. After Le Corbusier proposed a grid of high-rise buildings over historic Paris in the 1920s with his radical Plan Voisin for a renewal of Paris, the theme of urban axes came back into focus in the planning and development of the post-war period. According to the Schéma directeur de l'aménagement et de l'urbanisme de la région parisienne SDAURP, developed in the 1960s under Paul Delouvrier and introduced in 1965, conceptual axes, namely the “axes préférentiels”, were to ensure ‘order’ in the Paris region as a countermeasure to the hitherto barely controlled growth (SDAURP 1966).
The urban planning and architectural interventions in the French capital carried out under President François Mitterrand in the 1980s and 90s as part of the Grands projets extended Paris' central visual axis from the Louvre via the Arc de Triomphe to the Grande Arche in the La Défense business district. Since then, this Axe historique has linked historical and contemporary monuments both structurally and symbolically (see Chaslin 1985; Schmid 1996; Fierro 2003). Meanwhile, the sculptural project Axe majeur (1980–2008, to be expanded, https://www.axe-majeur.info/historique/histoire) by Israeli artist Dani Karavan (1931–2021) in the “ville nouvelle” Cergy-Pontoise, northwest of Paris, represents a rather quiet, but still powerful gesture towards the turn to the 21st century (Mollard 2011). The Axe majeur—planned together with the housing estate Les Colonnes de Saint-Christophe (1981–86) by Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura—continues the history of axial planning (fig. 3), in which ground and aerial perspectives complement each other, within the Paris Region (fig. 2).
Urban axes and grid plans, made from an addition of axes, have existed for some thousands of years: Mohenjo-Daro (circa 2800–2500 BC), situated in today’s Pakistan, is the oldest known city with a grid plan (Stanislawski 1946). The “grid” though “has become a metaphor for modernity at large” (Rose Redwood 2008, 54) as we encounter it especially in modern urban planning, architecture, art, and graphic design. The much longer history of the implementation of urban axes and grid plans can, against Dan Stanislawski’s argument, neither only be linked to “authoritarian dictatorships, as they also have been planned in “liberal democracies just as easily as [in] capitalist or socialist regimes” (Rose-Redwood 2008; Brown 2001; Stanislawski 1946). Paris and its region, especially with the ville nouvelle Cergy-Pontoise, is an exemplar of the genealogy and longue durée of the urban axis planned from above under different political and aesthetic regimes.
Bibliography:
Abercrombie, Patrick. 1919. “Aerial Photography and Town Planning.” Country Life 45, (1170): 703–5.
Brown, K. 2001. “Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and Montana Are Nearly the Same Place. “ American Historical Review 106 (1): 17–48.
Chaslin, François. 1985. Les Paris de François Mitterrand: histoire des grands projets architecturaux. Paris: Gallimard.
Cohen, Jean-Louis. 2006. Above Paris. The Aerial Survey of Roger Henrard. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
Crampton, Jeremy W. 2006. “Maps as Social Constructions. Power, Communication and Visualization.” Progress in Human Geography 25, 2 (June): 135–52.
Fierro, Annette. 2003. The Glass State: The Technology of the Spectacle. Paris, 1981–1998. Cambridge (Mass.)/London.
Gervais, Thierry. 2013. “Expérimentations photographiques. La vision en plongée, de Nadar (1858) à Gaston Tissandier (1885).” In: Vues d'en haut, exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou-Metz, 18.05.–07.10.2013, ed. by Angela Lampe, 50–61. Metz: Centre Pompidou.
Giedion, Siegfried. 1928. Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton. Berlin/Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann Verlag.
Harley, J.B. 1988. “Maps, Knowledge, and Powert”. In The Iconography of Landscape, ed. By Denis E. Cosgrove, and Stephen Daniels. 277–312.
Henrard, Roger. 1952. Paris vu du ciel. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin.
Lefebvre, Henri. 2009 [1975]. “Space and State” [chapter from De l’État, 1975]. In: Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World, Selected Essays, ed. by Neil Brenner, and Stuart Elden. 223–53. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Loyer, François. (1992). “Le Paris d’Haussmann.” In: Paris, La ville et ses projets/A City in the Making, exhibition catalogue, expanded edition, ed. by Jean-Louis Cohen, and Bruno Fortier, 192–200. Paris: Éditions Babylone/Pavillon de L’Arsenal.
Mollard, Claude (ed.). 2011. La saga de l'axe majeur: Dani Karavan à Cergy-Pontoise. Issy-les-Moulineux: Beaux Arts éditions.
Mondenard, Anne de. 2018. “Der Eiffelturm in all seinen Facetten.“ In: Robert Delaunay und Paris, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthaus Zürich, 31.08.–18.11.2018, ed. by Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft/Kunsthaus Zürich, 136–43. Zürich/Heidelberg/Berlin: Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft/Kunsthaus Zürich/Kehrer Verlag.
Rose-Redwood, Reuben S. 2008. “Genealogies of the Grid: Revisiting Stanislawski's Search for the Origin of the Grid Pattern Town.“ Geographical Review 98 (1): 42–58.
Schmid, Erik. 1996. Staatsarchitektur der Ära Mitterrand in Paris, Ästhetische Konzeption und politische Wirkung. Regensburg: S. Roderer Verlag.
Schweizer, Stefan. 2013. André le Nôtre und die Erfindung der französischen Gartenkunst. Berlin: Wagenbach.
[SDAURP] Délégation générale au district de la région de Paris. 1966. Schéma Directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris, 1965.
Stanislawski, Dan. 1946. “The Origin and Spread of the Grid-Pattern Town.“ Geographical Review 36 (1): 105–120.