Architecture in Paris: from Notre-Dame to the Centre Pompidou

Architecture in Paris is above all Gothic, royal classicism and the metropolis of the 19th century. The most important buildings are Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle from the Middle Ages, the Dôme des Invalides and the Panthéon from the 17th and 18th centuries, the Arc de Triomphe, the Opéra and the Eiffel Tower from the 19th century and the Centre Pompidou from 1977. Just outside the city lie Saint-Denis, where Gothic was born, Versailles and Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye.

Facts

The city of Gothic

Gothic began a few kilometres north of Paris. Abbot Suger had the choir of the abbey church of Saint-Denis rebuilt, consecrated in 1144, with pointed arches, rib vaults and large windows that filled the space with coloured light. Most of the kings of France are also buried there. How to recognise Gothic is explained in the guide to recognising Gothic architecture.

Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité was begun in 1163 and was largely complete by the 1340s. It is one of the early churches where flying buttresses were used to carry the high vaults, and its three rose windows are among the most famous in the world. The fire of 2019 destroyed the roof and the 19th-century spire, and the cathedral reopened in December 2024. A couple of minutes away lies Sainte-Chapelle, built in 1242–1248 for Louis IX to house the Crown of Thorns and other relics. The upper storey is almost entirely glass, a room of coloured light.

The classicism of royal power

In the 17th century Paris became the centre of a French classicism that was more restrained than the Italian Baroque. The finance minister Nicolas Fouquet had Louis Le Vau, the painter Charles Le Brun and the garden architect André Le Nôtre build the château of Vaux-le-Vicomte in 1658–1661, and Louis XIV then took the same team to Versailles, where the court moved in 1682.

In the city Jules Hardouin-Mansart designed the Dôme des Invalides, built in 1677–1706 as the church of the great hospital for war veterans. The gilded dome is visible across the whole Left Bank, and Napoleon has rested there since the 19th century. On the hill of Sainte-Geneviève Jacques-Germain Soufflot built from 1758 a church with a dome and a Corinthian portico, which during the Revolution became the Panthéon, a mausoleum for the great men and women of France.

Paris in the 19th century

Napoleon commissioned the Arc de Triomphe after the victory at Austerlitz in 1805; it was completed in 1836 and at 50 metres is one of the largest triumphal arches ever built. Under Napoleon III in the 1850s and 1860s Paris was rebuilt under the direction of the prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Broad boulevards were driven through the medieval districts, and along them were built uniform apartment buildings in pale stone with balconies and mansard roofs of zinc, the Paris that most people think of today.

The principal building of the Second Empire is the Palais Garnier, the opera house whose competition the young Charles Garnier won and which was completed in 1875, with a marble staircase built so that the audience could see and be seen. For the World's Fair of 1889, a hundred years after the Revolution, Gustave Eiffel's company built the Eiffel Tower, 300 metres high and the world's tallest structure for four decades. It was meant to stand for twenty years; today it is the symbol of the city. Read more about tall buildings in the guide to the history of the skyscraper.

Behind the classical façades, iron was on the rise. Henri Labrouste gave the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève next to the Panthéon a reading room with vaults carried by slender arches of cast iron, completed in 1851. For the World's Fair of 1900 the Grand Palais was built with one of Europe's largest glass roofs, as was the railway station Gare d'Orsay, which since 1986 has been the Musée d'Orsay. Paris is one of the best cities in which to see how the 19th century combined historical styles with new technology, which is what the guide to historicism in architecture is about.

Modernism and the present

In the suburb of Poissy Le Corbusier built Villa Savoye in 1928–1931, a white house on slender pilotis with bands of windows and a roof garden, which sums up his five points for a new architecture. In the city is his Fondation Le Corbusier, in two villas in the 16th arrondissement.

The Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, opened in 1977, turned the building inside out: pipes, stairs and escalators are on the outside, colour-coded according to what they carry, so that the exhibition floors inside were left free. It became one of the first major examples of High-Tech; see the guide to High-Tech architecture. The most monumental housing of Postmodernism lies east of the city in Les Espaces d'Abraxas by Ricardo Bofill, 1978–1982. Later additions include I. M. Pei's glass pyramid at the Louvre, opened in 1989, and Frank Gehry's Fondation Louis Vuitton from 2014. West of the city the business district of La Défense has gathered Paris's tall buildings since the 1960s, and the Grande Arche, a hollow cube completed in 1989, lies on the extension of the long axis from the Louvre through the Arc de Triomphe.

The walk

Start on the Île de la Cité with Notre-Dame and Sainte-Chapelle. The Panthéon lies a short walk south in the Latin Quarter, and the Invalides and the Eiffel Tower further west along the Left Bank. On the Right Bank lie the Opéra, the Arc de Triomphe on the Champs-Élysées and the Centre Pompidou in the Marais. Saint-Denis and Versailles can be reached by suburban train, as can Poissy and Noisy-le-Grand.

All the buildings can be found on the map, and the French timeline in architectural history shows how they fit together, from Gothic via Louis XIV's grand siècle to the present. The art in the city's museums can be found in the art section, for example the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.

Not to be missed

Exercise

Which building in Paris was built to house relics, among them the Crown of Thorns?