The exhibition "The Courtyards of Paris - the City Behind the City" presented a chronological and educational tour of the evolution of courtyards, from closed courtyards in dense city areas to open courtyards in the more loosely built-up area in which the major projects of the 1950s were presented, as well as the eastern section of Paris now undergoing change, the Paris Left Bank Urban Development Zone.
Visitors were given an opportunity to discover the places that make up the city behind the city, both service courtyards and residential courtyards, places filled with memories as well as places for architectural experimentation. Highly evocative exhibit-wide themes, such as "Crossing thresholds", "Vertical gardens" and "The country in Paris" to mention only a few, were developed along the main axis of the exhibition. Attention was paid to the poetic aspects often hidden in such courtyards and the most remarkable or symbolic ones, such as Palais Royal, were lauded in the introduction to the exhibition.
Set design by Frédéric Borel
The various centripetal exhibition paths gravitated around an empty cube, drawing to it all the overhead natural light. The dense, noisy layers of information and exhibition contrasted with this clear, luminous, dilated and silent area.
It was as if a fragment of the city had suddenly undergone a change of scale or a switch in hierarchy, with a Cyclopean courtyard in the center and spaces for walking around at the outer reaches, and between them, housing so compressed and tightly-packed as to form nothing but a thick, ambivalent wall.
