Getting Around Paris

Through extensive original drawings, photographs, and essays, this book exhaustively documents Paris's Boulevard Périphérique and its surrounding area and, perhaps more significantly, provides a catalog of tactics by which large scale elements of infrastructure can begin to take on inflections from the city around them, and in doing so, to participate more meaningfully in urban life. The tactics outlined here suggest ways in which the “non-place” can be made specific. These tactics also illustrate a way to interpret elements of infrastructure as we would authored works of architecture – by assuming that nothing has been left to chance, and by looking closely at the moments when something beyond brute functionality enters in.