The House of Tristan Tzara
We did finally find the house of Tristan Tzara at 15 Avenue Junot, back up in the 18th arrondissement, to one side of Sacre Coeur, and it was as magnificent as I remembered it. This was in spite of the scaffolding set up to clean the face of the building : probably a bad mistake, as stone should age by itself. Adolf Loos, the Austrian architect did a fine piece of post-Mackintosh building in 1926, its new symmetry replaced the asymmetry of Scottish baronial of its ancestor.
I had just heard from Dublin architect Sam Mays, who told me of how he stepped off the train, in Paris for the first time, and went straight to see the house, after his summer job in a Dutch pickling factory. He mentioned that he and his wife Eileen Fitzpatrick had just finished a scheme for social housing further round the Boulevards in Stalingrad. So we set out the draw a line between these two points, passing through the street markets of Barbes-Rochechouart, where a bar of white chocolate might be exchanged for a can of chick-peas, to Rue Caillié, and their new buildings.SC
notes from an urban hibernation 