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LAURIE OLIN
France Sketchbooks
SKETCHBOOK SERIES
Laurie Olin and Pablo Mandel, editors
ORO EDITIONS Publishers of Architecture, Art, and Design Gordon Goff: Publisher www.oroeditions.com info@oroeditions.com Published by ORO Editions Copyright © ORO Editions and Laurie Olin, 2020. All rights reserved. Text and Images © Laurie Olin, 2020. All rights reserved. Copyright on book design © Pablo Mandel, 2020. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying of microfilming, recording, or otherwise (except that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. text Laurie Olin edited by Laurie Olin and Pablo Mandel copy editor Julia van den Hout oro project coordinator Kirby Anderson book design Pablo Mandel author portraits You Wu Texts set in Recoleta, TT Norms, and Plantin 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Library of Congress data available upon request. World Rights: Available ISBN: 978-1-943532-57-5 Color Separations and Printing: ORO Group Ltd. Printed in China. International Distribution: www.oroeditions.com/distribution ORO Editions makes a continuous effort to minimize the overall carbon footprint of its publications. As part of this goal, ORO Editions, in association with Global ReLeaf, arranges to plant trees to replace those used in the manufacturing of the paper produced for its books. Global ReLeaf is an international campaign run by American Forests, one of the world’s oldest nonprofit conservation organizations. Global ReLeaf is American Forests’ education and action program that helps individuals, organizations, agencies, and corporations improve the local and global environment by planting and caring for trees.
Contents
6 Foreword 12 Paris 88
Heading South
96 Provence 134
Haute Provence
154
Normandy
164
Aquitaine and Entre-Deux-Mers
188
Envoi
192 Credits and Acknowledgments 194
References
196 Biographies
Foreword
I love to draw. This is partly derived from the pleasure of making drawings and partly from the delight of being in a place and the experience engendered by simply looking carefully. Many of the earliest drawings in this book were made while I was in the process of becoming the designer and person I am today. Some of the more recent sketches were made after I pretty much knew what I wanted to do but continued to look at things carefully for what they might tell me. None of these sketches were created as illustrations for a text or thesis, but rather as an end in themselves, as notes to myself at a particular moment. They are in some ways small, graphic, one-page (or less) studies; sometimes they are merely notes, while on other occasions they are mini-essays of their own. Included in this book are captions identifying the subject as well as frequent transcriptions of some of the accompanying handwritten notes from my sketchbooks, which have been provided to help viewers look into, not merely at the drawings, and to follow where a situation led my thoughts. I’ve kept sketchbooks since my high school days in Alaska. It began as a way of making notes for paintings to be made later, mostly watercolors, some based on the sketches. As it turned out I didn’t become a painter. I continued drawing, however, as I went off to college, first to study civil engineering and later architecture. While in college I worked for a time in the bush, the mountains, and on the Bering Sea. There I drew what was around me, possibly with some
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sense that I was witnessing a special place in the process of changing, that a way of life on what even then was called “the last frontier” was disappearing. By the time I graduated from college and entered the army, keeping sketchbooks had become something of a habit and personal pleasure. I have been filling sketchbooks ever since as I’ve wandered about the world. There are several types of drawing in the sketchbooks of artists or designers. Some are simply a record of a preliminary thought, a study or exploratory sketch relating to something to be made later—a painting, sculpture, building, or some such, whether a fragment or overall composition. These can be quite detailed and carefully made to scale, or loose and conceptual. Sometimes such sketches are abstract and diagrammatic. On other occasions they are very representational, ranging from quick notes or doodles of various subjects such as the colors of the sky or landscape at a particular moment, an animal in motion that doesn’t allow more careful study, or details of something or someone. Related to this latter type and among those most often found in artists’ sketchbooks since the eighteenth century are travel sketches, many of which are now considered important works of art in their own right. Examples include Eugène Delacroix’s sketches of his visit to North Africa; J. M. W. Turner’s journey through Switzerland to Italy and back; and Edward Lear’s travels to Greece and the Middle East. In them we see not only a historical record of specific places, but also something of the personality of the artists, what interested them, and the particular style or handwriting they developed to accommodate or capture their material. All of these artists were making notes for paintings, which they hoped to do in their studios upon returning home. Despite a preliminary and occasionally fragmentary nature, there was an instinctive impulse to compose each page as though it was a miniature work of art on its own. For many people today, no matter how good the work that followed (and much of it is wonderful) these sketchbooks have a spontaneity, directness, and intimacy nearly impossible to reproduce in the formal setting of the studio later. So too, there are travel sketches and notebooks of designers, such as those of Le Corbusier’s early travels in the Middle East, and later
foreword
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to South America and India, or the drawings made by Alvar Aalto in Greece and North Africa, and Louis Kahn’s colorful studies from Italy, Greece, and Egypt. None of the things they record were copied directly in their work. Instead their drawings document things that interested them in terms of composition, form, technique, or response to a particular environment, and were in a number of ways taken up and absorbed, were helpful, even inspirational to them later. Like them, I’m often on the lookout for things that are interesting and might be useful in some way. At times they are merely a record of looking at something carefully, whether purely for pleasure or an attempt to capture the spirit or atmosphere of a place. The drawings and watercolors presented in this book were made in a variety of sketchbooks of different sizes and shapes over a fifty-year period. Looking back, I notice many seem to have as their point of view that of things seen out of the corner of my eye, off to one side that might not be noticed directly by others. They are of quiet, quotidian aspects of places and life. Somewhere in my education and the formation of my attitudes toward making architecture and landscape I developed an abiding interest in ordinary things: commonplace, humble objects around us that support our lives. Many of these are practical devices and habits of construction that have evolved over centuries, often with a great degree of variation in formal expression in different parts of the world, but with equal success. Functional items such as stairs and pavement, structural posts (columns), or public water spigots and troughs are in many cases considered carefully, taken up and given a celebrated form of expression. On numerous occasions this has produced the handsome arcades and fountains in the piazzas and squares of Italy and France, or ubiquitous and simple devices such as awnings and porches, invented and reinvented around the world to shelter people from the rain. The problem of knowing the nature of things, especially as may be discerned through visual perception, has engaged and puzzled thinking souls forever. Setting aside the truly useless views of a group of philosophers who deny the physical existence of the world, the rest of us still vacillate between feelings expressed in two opposing
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folk sayings: “seeing is believing” and “appearances are deceiving.” We know the world exists, but what its nature might be exactly, what drives it and gives it meaning for us are endlessly engaging questions if not finally to be resolved. Artists, especially early modern poets in America, have devoted considerable effort toward the contemplation and attempt to feel and express the essence of things and events. William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens placed emphasis upon “the thing itself, not ideas about the thing,” as did Theodore Roethke in his effort to feel his way into the “urge, wrestle, and resurrection” of growing plants. So too, this concern for the quotidian can be seen in paintings by individuals as dramatically different from each other as Paul Cézanne, René Magritte, Giorgio Morandi, and Henri Matisse. More recently Charles Simic put it thus: Just things as they are, Unblinking, lying mute In that bright light— And the trees waiting for the night. Surrealists, abstract expressionists, color field painters, and minimalists alike all confronted essences of the world around them and sought an adequate visual representation of their perception and understanding. All began with the raw material of the world around them, whether particular qualities of light or silence, the emptiness of jars and bottles, or the compact and lush contour of a torso or leaf with the juices of life pulsing beneath their surface. Drawing is about seeing and not about wriggling one’s wrist. It is also an act of the mind. Seeing is part of being awake, and perceiving is part of being sentient. In an age of speed, multi-tasking, mechanical extensions and prostheses of all sorts, and a surfeit of communication, drawing offers an opportunity to slow down and work directly with one’s own eyes, hands, and brain. Drawing also can lead to deep pleasure through focusing one’s attention. It can contribute to a profound awareness of being somewhere very particular. It can be as much a form of meditation as a form of communication.
foreword
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The drawings in this book were made in France at different periods in my life. I am fond of the place. I’m an American and, to some degree, an old fashioned “progressive,” in turns both liberal and conservative on various issues. I’m a landscape architect. It is difficult to have traveled, worked, and taught as I have in America, Europe, and Asia, to have been exposed to people and ecology without also becoming a citizen of the world. The sketches presented here are personal not scholarly, partial not comprehensive, subjective not objective. They are often accidental and the result of chance encounters, discovery, and in some cases repeat visits. Although these sketches were made in France, this is not particularly a “travel book,” but rather the notes made of things of interest to a designer. Readers or curious travelers will discover that much of France—its rich culture, landscape, and cities—is not here. Many important and interesting places, for example Lyon, Marseilles, and Nice, are absent. Entire regions such as Burgundy and Brittany are missing regrettably, more by accident than intent. Special places that I have visited and thoroughly enjoyed, some numerous times including Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte, simply didn’t get drawn. Even so, they wouldn’t have fit in this book, as there are already drawings from twenty-two different sketchbooks, dating from 1967 to 2017. There are a number of sketches done in cafés and public spaces over the years. This is because they are ideal places for spending time relaxing and socializing, for unhurried moments with room on one’s lap or table to open a sketchbook. One of my first lessons in France was that they were intended to be such places. Unlike cafés, it is next to impossible to draw in good restaurants, partly because of the complexity and the number of items furnishing the tabletop, the sequence of events in the presentation and delivery of the meal, and partly because in restaurants we are more animated and expect continuous engagement with our dining companions. One is often alone or less engaged in the casually associative atmosphere of sidewalk cafés, which seemingly has contributed so much to the thought and creativity of generations of writers and artists, whether local or foreign like me. Also, in France and especially in Paris, there are many
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parks, large and small, which are intended to be sat in for long periods of time, where one can draw comfortably and without haste. France presents different experience to different visitors. Things come to the prepared mind. For some France is couture or cuisine, for others iconic art or sybaritic beaches. For me initially it was urban and rural landscape: a remarkable catalog of historic examples, experiments, and successes. I have spent my time there looking and absorbing, thinking about their parks and streets, public spaces and built elements. Along the way, in total disorder I have encountered and enjoyed aspects of French life that are often the sole focus of experts and connoisseurs. Often with only vague notion of what is being said between people or in the daily news, I watch how people behave, what they do, and what is there physically. For some this might seem a limitation, but for me it has been good fortune. There are many things in France—architecture, art, the countryside, people, and gardens—which have moved me greatly. Drawing is a vital way to learn from the world. In doing so, I certainly have.
foreword
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Paris The Siren Call of France
“How ‘ya gonna to keep ‘em down on the farm (after they’ve seen Paree?)” —Sam M. Lewis, Joe Young, and Walter Donaldson, 1919
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ike most Americans growing up in the years immediately after World War II, I learned about Paris from movies and musicals, from stories (especially those regarding American expatriates between the wars), from elementary school art class, and books acquired in high school and after. Paris was the definition of foreign. It was sexy; it was artistic; it was intellectual; it was romantic. Paris was classy and chic. It was where Picasso, Camus, Sartre, and Brigitte Bardot lived. It was where American writers had wined, dined, and been bohemian before the War, and where jazz musicians went to get away from racism and the narcotics squad after the War. By the time I was in college, Paris was producing a new wave of movies that had an edge. The combination of liberated youth, wine, existentialism, and modern art made the city one of the most attractive destinations in the world for many in my generation. For anyone interested in art, literature or philosophy, Paris was it. Later, others under the spell of the Beat movement were drawn to Asia, especially to Japan and India, or to Latin America, especially Mexico. No one I knew thought of going to Spain, Greece, Germany,
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England, or Scandinavia, before they first went Paris. While New York City was rapidly emerging as the new center of the arts, certainly in America, Paris remained the queen of cities, and an entire generation of backpacking American veterans and students descended upon it to learn the mysteries of escargot, the Metro, and Gauloise cigarettes. In September 1967, eleven years after graduating from high school, six years after graduating from architecture school, and three years after migrating to New York, I finally made my pilgrimage to Paris. At the time, airline travel was still attractive—largely because everyone didn’t do it, I suppose. To boost business in the off-peak seasons one of the features of the day was a 21-day round trip excursion ticket that was dirt-cheap. Despite meager resources, even I could manage such a sum. So, with a minimum of thought and planning my wife and I set off. We both had things we hoped to see given our interests in literature, art, and architecture. Even then, despite sensing that Paris is truly an inexhaustible subject, I couldn’t bear the thought that on my first and, for the time being, only trip to Europe, I was to see no more of it than one city. Therefore, I proposed to spend the first and third weeks of our trip in the City of Light and the middle week in Arles. It was to be Paris for civilization, style, and life of the intellect; and Provence for the countryside, color, and art from the abdomen. The result was love at first sight on both counts. Paris in September 1967 was like Mecca, heaven to a young architect from Alaska like me. Here was civilization in the streets, in the galleries, in the cinema, on the plate, and in the parks. Here was a nation where art really mattered. It was a feast for the soul and eyes, and nourishment for one’s courage. A month later, back in America, came the surrealist experience of tear gas and the March on the Pentagon on my first visit to Washington, D.C. As our nation’s capital, it is the American city that was most consciously intended to emulate Paris in its layout and building design controls. Yet despite all the efforts of Thomas Jefferson, Pierre L’Enfant, Daniel Burnham, Nathaniel Owings, and scores of architects and planners, it completely fails to achieve any of the character and urbanity of Paris. The world was flying not falling apart, badly and rapidly. My recent experience
paris
Apse and buttresses of Notre Dame with fleche by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, destroyed 2019.
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Arranging flowers, Café Voltaire.
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of graceful Parisian streets with ranks of trees, cafés, markets, and brilliant art became a memory. Two pages after the sketches I made on that first trip are notes made in New York, where I lived at the time, expressing a desire to return to Europe. They simply say, “Rome Prize, Fulbright.” It would be three years before my next trip across the Atlantic and five before a two-year residency in Rome and England when I shuttled back and forth through Paris and Provence several times a year. In the forty plus years since, I’ve visited many times and can honestly say that on every trip to France I have been stimulated, have seen something new, and regretted leaving when I came home. Paris isn’t really my favorite city in the world, at least not quite. That would probably have to be Rome. Rome is rougher. Rome has more layers, more art out in the open. One can’t walk into almost any church in Paris and find masterpieces of art and architecture the way one can in Rome. On the other hand, Rome is dirtier, more chaotic, at times downright dysfunctional and irrational. Nevertheless, it has a power and a beauty, which has bewitched visitors and residents alike for centuries. Also, there is London, which like Paris has been a capitol city for a nation and empire, has a unique character and tempo, is nearly inexhaustible, and has a beauty and energy like few other places on earth. While I have hundreds of photographs and memories of London and dozens of sketchbooks from Rome, it was in Paris that I first found (or made) time to look carefully at particular attributes of urbanity, which have subsequently informed my professional work, primarily that of civic spaces and urban landscape design—the curbs, drains, pavements, trees, cafés, lamps, benches, the accoutrements, proportions, and materials of the public realm. Shortly after I completed the reconstruction of Columbus Circle in New York in 2005, a friend remarked “there’s really a lot of France in you.” On reflection, it seems at least partially true, especially considering an earlier project I began in 1982 that included the introduction of movable chairs and tables in New York’s Bryant Park, a 1930s design that was heavily derived from that of the Jardin du Luxembourg. In Paris, I encountered parks more urbane than those I had known. I was deeply affected by their clarity and handsome openness, their
left “Paris is so graphic, the white buildings with dark windows, dark tree trunks and doorways—dark people and cars sweeping about with animatesd sky above and leaves in color against the white.”
simple palette and formal elegance. Whether one studies seventeenth century urban set pieces like the Place des Vosges of Henri IV or the vast superstructure of public streets and parks implemented by Adolphe Alphand for Baron Haussmann during the nineteenth century, it is clear that the design of public space can be raised to an art transcending the instrumentality of infrastructure, problem solving, and the craft and technology involved. For me, the French preoccupation with overarching strategy, whether it be compositional or theoretical, as well as with details of execution was not only inspirational, but also informative practically. As can be seen in the sketchbooks, I have also often been more interested in quotidian items such as movable chairs and normative street scenes, than in monuments and grand urban spaces. Why do I still love Paris with almost a youthful infatuation fifty years after my first visit? Simply because as the twentieth century came to a close it seemed to be one of the only cities in the western world that really works, and works well on many levels—practically,
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Eighteenth century“Horses of the Sun above carriage entry to Hotel Rohan in the Marais.”
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aesthetically, spiritually—at least for many people, and not just for those who are well-to-do. Admittedly, Paris has enormous, stubborn problems of inequity with a vast population in its sprawling suburbs, especially immigrants, which it shares with many other great cities around the world. Recent social unrest and violent protests, a disastrous fire at Notre Dame, and the subsequent debates and controversy about rebuilding it are in a very French tradition of passionate expression and bold confrontation of issues affecting the populace. That this occurs at the center of the polis and nation seems appropriate, confirming the value and meaning of Paris for everyone. Paris continues to evolve with new layers and events for each succeeding generation, and despite cyclical upheavals, the extensive urban fabric of the city within its encircling highways that is shared by nearly all—commuters, suburbanites, city dwellers, commercial travelers, tourists, and visitors—remains splendid, functionally and aesthetically. One aspect of modern travel is that foreign visitors spend most of their time in public places, rarely penetrating the private living and working spaces of the daily routine, the intimate realm of domesticity, or places of production, craft, administration, and education—the offices, studios, workshops, and homes which actually comprise the bulk of a nation’s architecture. While this inevitably produces a distorted or at least partial view of a place and its people, it does reveal how a nation or city looks after itself in terms of public services, cultural facilities, and aspects of the environment it values. Considered this way, for the past 150 years Paris has consistently devoted more energy, art, and resources to its infrastructure and public realm than any other city in the world. The first sketch I ever made in France is of a young woman trimming flower stems for a bouquet she was about to set out in a restaurant on the Quai Voltaire. In retrospect nothing could be more appropriate to represent Paris or that aspect of French culture, which was to have relevance to my future, namely their love for gardens, parks, and flowers. To this day, some of my very favorite French paintings are those of cut flowers, made by Édouard Manet as he was dying, and the parks and squares of Jacques Boyceau, André Le Nôtre, and Jean-Charles
Adolphe Alphand. Even in their present altered state, they have profoundly influenced me as a landscape architect. The French love public parks and spend a great deal of time in them. Not surprisingly, there are many contradictions when one delves into the subject of parks and gardens in France, for the French are a delightfully (or maddeningly) contradictory bunch. One day they seem the children of Descartes—rational and methodical to a ridiculous degree, bloodless slaves to rules and endless regulations; at other times they seem totally passionate, irrational, and emotional, unwilling to submit to any authority. One example of this contradictory nature: there are nice parks—large and small—throughout the city, yet they are chock full of fences, screens, rails, barriers, gates, hedges, and walls. Everywhere a remarkable manifestation of the love of boundaries, containment, and demarcation is present. No other western country so fills its public spaces with the trappings of private boundaries and territorial reservation. For all their imagination and
paris
“Place des Vosges, unfinished sketch of the square with one of the nineteenth-century fountains. Abandoned because of one of the well-known and frequent spring showers.”
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Café, Quai Voltaire.
poetics, especially a number of the recent parks—Parc de la Villette, Park André Citröen, Parc de Bercy, Jardin Atlantique, Parc Diderot— are remarkably fussy in this way. Strange. Despite a French preoccupation with the present and a love for modernity and cultivation of avant-garde behavior in any number of artistic and academic fields, the ghost of one of their greatest artists—landscape architect André Le Nôtre—hovers over even the most recent parks and gardens. What is so good and inspirational in the work of Le Nôtre? Why do my peers and I care after all the intervening years, since none of us live or think like the French aristocracy or
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architects of the seventeenth century? Put simply, it is because there is such great clarity and harmony in the geometry and structure of his schemes and in the simple, yet fundamental palette of materials employed in his gardens. Allées and bosques of deciduous trees, long stone walls—often faced with evergreen hedges—rectangular stone steps and ramps, basins in elementary geometric forms, gravel, and clipped shrubs; it is a simple palette of plants, stone and water. The parts are elementary, but the hydraulics and optics employed were as advanced as the period could produce, engaging light, shade, movement, and sky in effects both subtle and bold. Le Nôtre’s generally low-tech constructions were well-built, and capable of endurance and restoration. Employing local renewable materials and interacting with the hydrologic cycle in an ecologically effective manner, they exemplify a number of the things we describe today as sustainable. Many of the water features Le Nôtre developed—such as for two of his greatest creations, Versailles and Sceaux near Paris—were a response to the poorly drained and sodden nature of their sites, which were located in bottomland. Draining adjacent lands, he constructed basins in the late seventeenth century that are still intact today, with only coping or capstones in need of repair or replacement from time to time. Even now, Le Nôtre exceeds and towers over his successors in France and Europe in much the same way that Frederick Law Olmsted does two centuries later for American landscape architects. Despite three centuries of change, replanting, and adjustment, the Jardin des Tuileries and Jardin du Luxembourg, two of his urban gardens that became among the very first public parks, remain quintessential examples of Le Nôtre’s artistic vision.
paris
“Two dog dinner Brasserie Bourgogne.” Café Voltaire in the Quai Voltaire, a quintessential conservative and comfortable bar/café across from the Louvre on the left bank—a plaque notes that Voltaire was born and died here. sb 149/2008
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