Look at that entrance. Those green iron curves, that amber glass canopy — it looks like something that grew out of the sidewalk. Like a plant that decided to become architecture.
A man named Hector Guimard designed this. He designed a hundred and forty-one Metro entrances for Paris, and he didn't stop at the entrances. He designed the railings, the lettering, the lampposts — and at home, he designed his own wallpaper, his own carpets, his own furniture, his own doorknobs. Every single doorknob. This was a man who could not walk into a room without redesigning it.
Parisians HATED it. They called his style noodle style. Tapeworm style. Mutton bone style. A critic in Le Figaro said the lamps looked like enormous frog eyes. When he proposed an entrance for the Opera station — right next to the grand Palais Garnier — the city council rejected it as incongruous. That rejection essentially ended his Metro career.
Of a hundred and forty-one original entrances, only eighty-six survive. The c
ity kept ripping them out for decades. And this particular entrance — the gorgeous glass canopy you're looking at — isn't even FROM here. It spent its first seventy-four years at the Hotel de Ville station across the river. In nineteen seventy-four, they dismantled it piece by piece and carted it across Paris to Montmartre. Only two original glass canopy entrances survive in the entire world. This
