12
Into the southeast of Paris recently: the 12th arrondissement, a strange place 20 minutes from the medieval Marais.
It’s a reclaimed industrial area that feels dissonant to pop up out of the metro into, still full of Parisians — the usual willowy girls and floppy-haired, three-day stubbled men with scarfs and cigarettes sit in cafés and tabacs, but they’re shiny, metallic cafés and tabacs in the ground floors of sharp-edged Futuropolis condo developments, surrounded by vast building sites and corporate towers. It’s a bit like Coal Harbour in Vancouver, or Portland’s Pearl District, or any of those retro-fit warehouse districts, but bigger, more dystopian. It’s a new Alphaville.
I started at Cour St-Emilion, an old wine-warehouse area that’s been turned into a fake French village full of chain stores and branded restaurants — and walked through the Parc Bercy, across the Simone de Beauvoir footbridge over the Seine, past the Piscine de Josèphine Baker to the Site François Mitterand Bibliotheque Nationale Francaise. I’d planned a big walk through the 12th into the 15th, but took too long being taken aback at the science-fiction landscape I’d walked into, and before I knew it, I’d spent an hour at the BNF alone.
Y and I went back a couple of days later, wandering into the middle of some sort of anime convention in Parc Bercy, with various elves and vampires and warriors involved in a fashion show on a little footbridge, and then checked out the interior of the BNF, a massive 1995 complex designed by Dominique Perrault. Strangely attractive, though I don’t think this is the Paris I want to live in.
