The exhibition functions as a demonstration, examining the city’s characteristics in and of themselves, outside their historical context. More than 100 drawings, plans, archived documents, photographs by Cyrille Weiner, and numerous models enable visitors to rediscover this architectural heritage at all levels. The exhibition redraws, classifies, and compares the roadways, identifies the public spaces, organizes the blocks and the buildings in function of their current geometry.

By analyzing the city’s form to understand its meaning, this exhibition and its accompanying catalogue, which was conceived as a contemporary retro-atlas of Haussmann’s territory, reinterpret the city both in terms of its volumes and its history and usages. The data acquired, together with the technologies used and calculations made by the architects Umberto Napolitano, Benoit Jallon and architect and engineer Franck Boutté, reveal a new urban structure that can be understood using contemporary criteria. How “walkable” is Haussmann’s urban fabric compared to that of the world’s other major cities? Why is the incredibly high density of the Haussmann model so comfortable? How energy-efficient are its blocks and buildings in terms of current standards?

The sharing of walls, mutability, density, materiality, compactness, a balance of full and empty spaces, a diversity of activities… all the city’s capacities revealed in the exhibition Paris Haussmann provide us with an opportunity to reinterpret the criteria of contemporary urban design within a system where performance requirements exist in balance with the pleasure of inhabiting, where resilience becomes architecture.

“Paris Haussmann. City Model. ” is a traveling exhibition that was presented in 2017 in Paris at the Pavillon de l'Arsenal, the same year at the Chicago Architecture Biennale and in 2018 at the Belem Cultural Center in Lisbon.

Photo credit : Julien Lanoo