This exhibition told one hundred and fifty years of the history of the formation of Paris's city limits, from the construction of the last town wall of Paris in the mid 19th century to the completion of the Boulevard Périphérique ring road in 1973.
This history was presented in a double walk through time and space.
The center-piece of the exhibition was the contemporary part, a sort of inventory taken in the early 1990s, with a superb 35 metres long model by the sculptor Wim Jansen. This 1:1000 scale walkthrough, illustrated by photographs and models, was an impressionistic memory of a walk around Paris.
The exhibition's historic dimension was conveyed by four exhibition rooms placed around this large model, depicting the four major periods of these one hundred and fifty years of history: from construction of the town walls to the Siege of Paris in 1871, the debates and projects by supporters of the proposed modifications of the obsolete town walls, the modifications after the Second World War, construction of the inner boulevards belt around the city limits with adjacent areas of mainly low-cost housing, and, lastly, the ring road.
