Afterlives of the Tour Saint-Jacques: Plotting the Perceptual History of an Urban Fragment

Abstract

Appended to a medieval Parisian church in the sixteenth century and stranded by revolutionary destruction, the Gothic Tour Saint-Jacques figures prominently in the city's nineteenth- and twentieth-century architectural imagination. This study of the modern afterlives of an emblematic monument, featured in the projects of Haussmann, Le Corbusier, and the surrealists, uses the lens of "perceptual history," or a plotting of the ways in which the site has been read and inhabited over time, to argue that successive representations of a city fabric have a transformative effect on the lived reality of that fabric. To anchor this rumination within a larger speculation on the how and why of heritage making, we focus as well on the tower's emergent patrimonial status, consolidated by the physical fixes of repeated restoration and the fixing of its image by graphic and photographic representation. The traumas of the tower's particular semantic journey offer compelling evidence of the availability of symbolic redefinition as a viable and even necessary option for historic architectures under pressure in our inherited city centers. Repeatedly spared by its own mutability, the Tour Saint-Jacques would now appear inviolate, embraced as a trace of an unrecoverable past, a contact zone between contemporary Parisians and their forebears.

Architectural Heritage Recognition in Historical Film Footage Using Neural Networks

“…The priory was torn down in 1797 after civil unrest, but the bell tower was protected because considered of high architectonic value (Meurgey, 1926). The tower was embedded in the urban pattern, but during the restoration in the 1850s it was moved from the original position and elevated on a decorative stone podium (O'Connell, 2001). Even now the tower exists and appears in many historical film footage (from the 1910s until 1960s) stored in several video archives in Paris (Lobster, CNC, Forum des Images).…”

The Historic Building in the Modernized City: The Cathedrals of Paris and Rouen in the Nineteenth Century

“…Along with some other preserved monuments it illustrated the city's and the nation's past achievements, especially in the field of architecture. 41 Certainly by the Second Empire, the Gothic had come to be understood as one of France's important contributions to architecture and to Western culture in general. With its Gallery of Kings restored, masonry repaired, and decorative program enhanced, Notre-Dame offered little evidence of the intervening centuries in which medieval architecture had been critically disparaged and the political shape of the nation itself the subject of periodic battles.…”