On Tuesday, 14 July 2009, Seung-Jin, Emily, Gary and I celebrated, along with all of Paris, the 220th anniversary of the supremely influential French Revolution.

Photo by Seung-jin Ham

In the 1850s, Baron Haussmann gave Paris the Kärcher treatment, carving wide boulevards through the fabric of the city, and creating diagonals that link key points of interest.

The facades along these boulevards were made available to developers who, according to strict guidelines, gave Paris its modern-day identity. I have always been amazed that people actually live in apartments behind these ornate windows in the city-center.

Photo from http://www.skyscrapercity.com

While the triangles created by Haussmann give Paris many Gridiron buildings, I have wondered how the architects at the time articulated spaces behind the street facades and in the center of these triangles. Working on a SoHo project in junior studio last semester I realized that even in the New York grid there are awkward alleys and hollow spaces that only Google Earth reveals. Vito Acconci has been very interested in these forgotten urban spaces.
I see from my office window what happens when the ornate facades are projected backward into the triangular space. Small courtyards with tall concrete walls and strange corners intersecting one another tell the story of an older, more congested Paris.

To explain Fête de la Musique to a Princeton student, I would simply have to ask them to imagine Princeton lawnparties taking place on a national scale.

At lawnparties different music bands perform at the eating clubs; at the Fête de la Musique, every public square, cafe, museum and bridge in Paris (and in all of France) is animated by bands playing different kinds of music.
So on Sunday all of Paris was one big concert space, and pedestrians replaced cars on streets. I walked around Paris with my friends from work (Seungjin, Emily and Gary), interns at kilo architectures. We ate lunch at the canal and then made our way through Paris, picking up free food from vendors at the open air market near Place de la Bastille, and walking along the Seine to sample some of the music. We met up with Ruben, another kilo architect, at the Saint Michel fountain and then headed for the Luxembourg Gardens. There we had a picnic with cheese and wine and cookies. By this time I was so exhausted that I had to go take a nap.

In the evening I went to the Louvre to catch the symphony orchestra concert but it was full by the time we got there. So we went to the Centre Pompidou. In the beautiful night the building glittered elegantly. Sitting on the esplanade, looking at Centre Pompidou, and hearing the festive sounds of the city around me was in itself intoxicating. Later there was confetti and loud music and a lot of people and it all seems like a blur now. I am just glad that the metro was open all night thanks to the Fête de la Musique.

Seungjin, Emily and Gary at the Fontaine St. Michel

I look forward to going to work everyday because of the really friendly people at kilo. The internship has helped me learn a lot about working as an architect in the "real" world. All kinds of practical (as well as absurd) considerations and requirements have to be accounted for in the conception of architectural design, and redesign, and re-re-redesign. Another essential difference from being at school is that one is implementing another person's (or group's) design concept and so it is all the more dangerous to get too attached to the project. You have to maintain a careful balance between giving your very best and taking a back seat when drastic changes are made, so that you will return the next morning and still go on with yet a new iteration. But if the process has made me disciplined and patient on the one hand, it has also reinforced my determination to go to grad school right after Princeton, so that I can become a real architect ASAP.

Overall, this summer is very different from the last because ten hours of my day are spent at work. Yet Paris is as fascinating as ever, both in its glittering beauty and in its deeper, darker mysteries.

In the last three days, I started work at kilo, visited Le Corbusier’s Pavilion Swisse, went on a picnic with people at work, bought gorceries and the pass Navigo, and met up with some old friends. Yet while I am very much in Paris now, my heart is still in New York.

Le Corbusier's Pavilion Swisse at the Cite Universitaire

Thursday was my first day at work. The people at kilo architectures are very friendly and almost everyone speaks English. There are other students from Yale and the GSD but it seems like I am the only undergraduate. A few people only speak English and I got along rather well with them. Despite all this my first day was a little frustrating. I was assigned to make a cardboard model for one of several iterations of a residential project. The scale of the model was 1:200 (tiny) and I was using traditional an x-acto knife instead of a laser-cutter. So I felt incompetent as I struggled to understand the project and work on it at the same time. But because Lee Wen (my supervisor) was extremely helpful and supportive, I kept going. All of us had lunch together in the office at 1pm (we ordered Thai salad from a nearby place) and that was fun. By the end of the day I was sick of the little model and my slow progress on it. Somehow I felt I was not good enough for this job.

The second day, I had a secret resolve: I wanted to match Princeton’s laser-cutter and its effortless precision and speed. I know it’s silly to compete with an anthropomorphized machine but it worked. I did my Princeton thing where I get up and take a short break every hour. I finished it by the end of the day; it wasn’t perfect but it was good enough to get a complement from Lee Wen (which meant a lot to me). The best part was that I was learning and enjoying the process by then. As I sat there inserting walls using tweezers, cutting out windows, and laying out the landscape around the building, I was beginning to understand the scope of the project by psychologically inhabiting it. We also had a discussion about the merits of the concept behind the design.

At the end of Friday (Day 2), we had a “picnic.” We all went to a nearby park with a lot of food and drinks. This was a good opportunity to talk to some of the other interns. We may be going together to Marseilles to see Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation! And Emily (from Yale) even said she might be interested in going along with me to look at the public housing projects in the Paris suburbs.

On Saturday I met up with Gregoire and Stephanie, my friends from a New York internship in 2006. We met at the great arch at La Defense, which I had not seen before. It was enormous. I felt like a tiny laser-cut person in an architecture model of a scale out of this world. The horizon was expansive and in the far distance I could make out the Champs Elysees.

It was great to meet my friends again. All of us were surprised and pleased by my French. As we walked to another café in central Paris, Stephanie’s boyfriend (Etienne, whose English is as good as my French) and I talked in a mixture of English and French and it helped us both practice the other language in a very, very practical way.

Earlier in the day I had gone to walk along the Seine and get a coat for these unusually cold summer days in Paris. Of course, central Paris bombards one with it majestic grandeur, architectural detail, and strong sense of history. But I felt a change in the air as well. Near the Hotel de Ville there were people gathered in a square with a huge outdoor screen projecting the French Tennis Open. There were smaller enclosures where children were playing tennis. Behind the screen, in the distance, you could see the large side façade of the Notre Dame. This juxtaposition between the old and new made me aware of the past, presnt, and unseen future at the same time. Close by was the Centre Pompidou, which now seemed at home in this city, a shrine no less than the Notre Dame. I realized how expensive Paris is, and I was humbled to think that the opportunity for me to be here was made possible by Princeton.

Speaking of which, it made me happy to find out that everyone in France knows about Princeton and they get really impressed when they find out I am a student there.

Tomorrow, I will return to my 9-7 workday. Deep down I am a little scared about it. I told myself I am an undergraduate and I'm not getting paid for this. Yet someone is paying for me being here so I know that I will try my best. I think this internship is really the best place I could be right now, but I know I want to go to design school and become a real architect as soon as possible.

I am back at the Cité Universitaire campus after less than a year. Last time, I was here for 17 days. And yet everything is so familiar that moving in feels almost like returning to Princeton after a break.

British Airways and London Heathrow was a combination of nice and not-so-nice—nice because some of the flight attendants were very kind and friendly, and a little awkward because BA and the security at Heathrow always make me feel like I've done something wrong, like I don't belong; there's a sense that I'm being discriminated against in a way that I can't exactly pinpoint.

Anyway, Starbucks (to the rescue) and the efficient and quick processing at Charles de Gaulle airport was like a refreshing breeze. As I set off for central Paris from the airport (which is located in the suburbs of Paris) I began to see the public housing architecture that I have been researching and writing about all spring semester at Princeton.

Unfortunately I didn't catch the announcement that I had to switch trains at the first station in Paris. Soon I realized I was on my way back to the airport in the same train. I panicked and exited on the next station, baggage and all. This station just happened to be Drancy, which was ironic because Drancy was the site of the first Grand Ensemble, a horrific array of “modern” slabs with repetitive housing units that were used during the Second World War as a prison for Jews who were being transported to Auschwitz. It is the epitome of architecture gone wrong, both in terms of form and symbolism, and was later taken down. However, the stark contrast between the City of Lights and its forsaken suburb was evident, for there were no manicured gardens, gargoyles, or monuments here—only high-rise apartments in empty space, lots of graffiti, and people who didn't resemble Parisians.

Finally I got on another train and came to Paris. Tomorrow I start work at kilo architectures.

Starting June 4th 2009, I will be working as an intern architect at kilo architectures which is located on Rue Réaumur in Paris. I am looking forward to the opportunity of working for founding partner Linna Choi.

I am a little intimidated. The working hours are 9am-7pm with a one-hour break. The last time I "worked" outside Princeton was at the Actors Theater Workshop in New York City. That was an extraordinary experience and it's interesting that I'll see some of the friends I made there in Paris this summer. That thought and the end of what has been my best semester at Princeton gives me more confidence in all this.