Ax historique
The Ax historique ( German " historical axis " ) of Paris is the great urban visual axis from the center through the west of the city: It is not only a main route, but the visual and monumental orientation line, which today has its geographical starting point in the tower of the Church of Saint- Germain l'Auxerrois to the east of the Palais du Louvre - but historically in the central pavilion of the Tuileries Palace, which was destroyed in 1871 . The urban artery of Paris is also called Voie triomphale ( German " path of triumph " ).
course
Starting at the bell tower of the Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois church east of the Louvre, the Ax historique runs to the west first through the Louvre and the Tuileries, via the Place de la Concorde , the avenue des Champs-Élysées and the avenue de la Grande Armée up to to the Porte Maillot . In Neuilly-sur-Seine , this straight continues over the Avenue Charles-de-Gaulle , the Pont de Neuilly and finally crosses the Parisian district of La Défense . Between Porte de Maillot and La Défense, the axis runs along national road 13 .
The axis includes minor changes in direction of important buildings: the Cour Carrée des Louvre deviates by 6.5 degrees from the Ax historique . The Grande Arche on the central perspective in La Défense also deviates by 6.5 degrees from the historical axis, since the traffic tunnels running there had to be statically taken into account. However, this does not change the direction of the axis.
history
The beginnings of this axis go back to the year 1564, when Caterina de 'Medici had a widow's seat, the Tuileries, built with a regularly laid out garden on the other side of the Paris city walls. From 1640 onwards, André Le Nôtre , the garden designer and landscape architect of the palace in Versailles , orientated himself on this, or more precisely on the central dome pavilion of the Tuilerie Castle , when he had an avenue laid out to the west.
After the Champs-Élysées were built, there were only a few houses between the Tuileries Gardens and the new street. However, these were during the tenure of Louis XV. removed, after which the resulting space was first named. Today it is known as the Place de la Concorde .
On the angular Place du Carrousel between the outermost wings of the Louvre, Napoléon I had the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel built in 1807 . The triumphal arch on Place de l'Étoile ( Place Charles de Gaulle since 1970 ), completed in 1836 , then formed the outermost point of the axis.
The axis was extended further west beyond the city limits with the construction of the avenue de la Grande Armée . It ended in the small suburb of La Défense , which was named after the city's defense against the Prussians in 1871. This suburb has developed into a business district since the 1950s. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand initiated the construction of a modern version of the triumphal arch. The Grande Arche de la Fraternité was created and inaugurated in 1989.
Monuments on the Ax historique
- Louvre
- Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel
- Luxor Obelisk on Place de la Concorde
- Triumphal Arch on Place Charles de Gaulle
- Grande Arche
literature
- Ernst Seidl: La Grande Arche de La Défense in Paris: Form - Power - Sense . Kovac ,, Hamburg 1998, ISBN 3-86064-702-4 .
- Ernst Seidl: Grand Ax - Paris . In: H. Engel (Ed.): Via triumphalis: Historical landscape 'Unter den Linden' between the Friedrich monument and the castle bridge . Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-05-003057-7 , pp. 131-145 .
- Ernst Seidl: Unter den Linden of the Champs-Elysées . Axes and their breaks as symbolic forms , in: Nanni Baltzer, Philipp Ursprung (ed.): Art history on the move. Festschrift for Kurt W. Forster , Zurich 2010, pp. 298–312.
