2024-01-04 07:00:01
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Period photographs and films, models and plans of today, the Cité de l’architecture tells the story of the construction of the Paris metro from its origins to the project for lines 15, 16, 17 and 18 which should be completed in 2030 A fascinating journey through the centuries with what it says about the evolution of society and its culture.
France Télévisions – Culture Editorial
Published on 04/01/2024 06:00
Reading time: 5 min Exterior perspective of Clichy-Montfermeil station (line 16), Benedetta Tagliabue EMBT arch., 2019. (ARCHITECT MIRALLES TAGLIABUE EMBT / BORDAS+PEIRO / SOCIETE DU GRAND PARIS)
One hundred and thirty years after the opening of the first metro in Paris, the four new lines of the Grand Paris Express should make it much easier to travel from suburb to suburb. An exhibition at the City of architecture and heritage traces the history of the Paris metro and presents the project with all the questions it raises.
As 1900 and the Universal Exhibition approached, Paris was saturated, the horse-drawn buses seen in extracts from period films and the trams were no longer sufficient for the circulation of a population which had become very busy. increased over the past century. London already acquired an urban railway network in 1863, like New York in 1868, Berlin in 1882.
More than a hundred projects were imagined for a Parisian metropolitan railway, some of which were a little eccentric, like Captain Mazet’s floating boat. It was finally under the direction of the chief engineer of municipal services, Fulgence Bienvenüe, that in twenty months the first line of the Paris metro between Porte de Vincennes and Porte Maillot was completed. It opened to the public on July 19, 1900. The network gradually extended between 1900 and 1932, to twelve lines over 132 kilometers.
Titanic works
Photos and films from the time show us the titanic undertaking, the complex work, the technical challenges, the digging with a pickaxe, the clearing with a shovel, the construction of the vaults. 850,000 m3 of earth would have been moved for the construction of line 1 alone. These archives evoke a complicated basement, full of holes like Swiss cheese, already crossed by water and gas pipes and by the sewer network. Sometimes, we have to build sections on the surface. The passage of the metro under the Seine is a tour de force, just like the superposition of the tracks under the Place de l’Opéra. Stations like Abbesses must be dug very deep due to the presence of old gypsum quarries.
Concorde station (1st-8th arrondissement), rue de Rivoli. Completion of the metal deck. Charles Maindron (1861-1940), photographer, July 25, 1899. Modern print (2023). (RATP GROUP COLLECTION)
The work has its tragedies, such as the “decompression” accident at the Cité station, mentioned on the front page of Little Parisian on January 12, 1908, which caused the death of five workers.
From the RER to Greater Paris
The metro is also an aesthetic: Hector Guimard was entrusted with the creation of the station entrances, with their famous green scrolls and canopies. Photos or a painting by Marcel Gromaire (1892-1971) show us cars already crowded in the first decades of the last century. A second-class wagon from the famous Sprague-Thomson trains, with its wooden seats and luggage racks, which ran until the 1970s and 1980s, has been reconstructed.
The Guimard Metro, 1931-1933, photograph by Brassaï. (PARIS CENTER POMPIDOU / MNAM / CCI)
The metro stimulates the imagination and will attract film directors, as evidenced by film scenes, from Godard to Jean-Pierre Melville. It inspired board games, the Métrolic (1922) or the Metropolitan Lottery (1910).
From 1928, we thought about extending the network to the inner suburbs and as we discovered on a map from 1934, it then crossed the limits of Paris, Boulogne-Billancourt being the first city on the outskirts to be served. In the 1960s, transport around Paris developed with the RER (Regional Express Network): three lines designed from 1965, with the birth of new towns, along the urbanization axes. Here again, they cross Paris and connect the capital to the suburbs, with new large stations (Auber, Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, Nation, etc.) with a very 1960s aesthetic. The first trains of the first section of line A, with their orange seats, circulated on December 12, 1969. We can follow one of the first travelers in a television news report.
From suburb to suburb
While until now, the network has always been imagined as a star, from the center to the periphery, the novelty introduced by the Grand Paris Express project, under consideration for around fifteen years, is to think of suburban travel as a suburbs by 2030, with the first station openings in 2024. It plans 200 km of automatic metro network, four new lines constituting a large double loop, easier access to airports with an extension of line 14, 68 new stations.
The “Venus” created by Prune Nourry for the Saint-Denis Pleyel station, exhibition “Metro! Grand Paris on the move”. (GASTON BERGERET / CECILE SEPTET / CITY OF ARCHITECTURE AND HERITAGE)
The second part of the exhibition is devoted to this project. While the stations of the old metro were all designed on the same model, like the first schools of the Republic, the stations of Greater Paris are imagined as unique places, rooted in a particular territory. Each is designed by an architect with an associated artist, who will create sculptures, light works and frescoes.
For the Bagneux-Lucie Aubrac station, Tatiana Trouvé imagines a stone and bronze floor where objects are encrusted, for the Montrouge station, Laurent Grasso paints a sky inspired by Renaissance trompe-l’oeil ceilings. For the Saint-Denis Pleyel station, Prune Nourry created 108 “Venus” inspired by the first sculptures of women from the Paleolithic.
Through models, images, sketches and works of art, 16 of these future stations are presented to us in their diversity. And then, on five screens, the exhibition gives the floor to 25 city actors and intellectuals, from the architect-urban planner Antoine Grumbach to the writer Aurélien Bellanger, from the researcher Bruno Barroca, specialist in urban territories, to the director Cédric Klapisch. They tell us what, for them, “makes Greater Paris”.
“Metro! Greater Paris on the move”
City of architecture and heritage
Palais de Chaillot, Trocadéro, Paris
Every day except Tuesday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., late-night Thursday until 9 p.m.
Prices: 9 euros / 6 euros (12 euros / 9 euros with access to the museum)
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