Notes on architecture

A rainbow leads to Place Massena after a sunrise shower. The elevated Buddha-like figures ― there are seven ― are by the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa. This stretch of tramway was constructed in 2007.

After a five-year closure, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris will reopen in three weeks. The news got me to thinking about Paris' half-Italian cousin on the Mediterranean, which looks a lot like the capital but with one profound difference: Nice has zero Gothic architecture. No skyward-straining spires or steeples. The city has been besieged and burned to the ground too many times.

Not only that, whatever archives that existed documenting life in the Middle Ages here were destroyed when a powder magazine on the chateau hill exploded during Louis XIV's first siege in 1691. 

Poof. Institutional amnesia. Visual amnesia.

The Gallo-Roman stuff you can't destroy, of course. In the northern suburb of Cimiez is this modest amphitheater, about 65 meters in diameter. 

After gladiator games were outlawed in 404 A.D., wild-animal and acrobatic displays were the draw. The archaeologists say it seated 4,000 people. Today it is used to play petanque, as these folks are doing, kick le ballon around or discreetly sip a beer. It's open 24/7 and is just part of the neighborhood.

A few steps from here is a Roman bath complex built in the 1st century (feels strange typing that), and added to in the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Each therma had cold, warm and hot rooms, a pool and marble paneled walls.

Today, much of Nice looks like this: 

You know how almost every building in Paris is six stories tall? Nice is like that ― like Haussmann's articulation of the early Belle Epoque.

One also encounters a lot of Turin-style Neoclassicism. That's harder to define. To borrow from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, it's like pornography ― you know it when you see it.

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