Conceived during the Liberation of Paris, I grew up in the most beautiful city in the world. My parents looked forward to rebuilding their lives without forgetting their recent history.
As I had the good fortune to live Boulevard Saint Michel, in the heart of the Latin Quarter, I was sent to neighborhood schools and high schools, all a couple of blocks away and all, I would learn later, with a very impressive roster of past students.
For elementary and middle school, I attended the Lycée Montaigne. To me, going to school meant crossing the Jardins du Luxembourg by foot twice a day, all year ‘round. Karl Lagerfeld and Jean-Paul Sartre went to the Lycée Montaigne.
For high school, I was sent to the Lycée Louis Le Grand, founded in 1563, just a short walk through the halls of the Sorbonne. Famous alumnae compose an impressive list, from Molière to André Michelin, Edgar Degas to the Marquis de Lafayette, and Jean-Paul Sartre. These over-achievers did not help me get the required grades, but while at Louis Le Grand, I filed a patent for a video rear view mirror.
To have a second chance at finishing high school, I switched to the Lycée Henri IV, just behind the Pantheon. The Lycée Henri IV, founded in 1796, is a beautiful classic group of buildings and Alma Mater to the Duc d’Orleans, Baron Haussman, Simone Veil and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Finally equipped with my Baccalauréat, I joined the Ecole des Beaux-Arts to study architecture nine months before the student riots of May 1968.
The Ecole des Beaux-Arts is squeezed between the Boulevard Saint Germain and the Seine. The streets around are filled with galleries, cafés and art supply stores. As a rookie, I was confronted with classical charcoal drawing from a plaster model & the rendering of stone ornaments with a flawless wash of India ink. I took geometry but not much architecture yet. The school of architecture separated itself from the fine arts section, and we moved across the river to an aisle of the Grand Palais with a couple of other ateliers. At the time, an atelier was a school within a school, where the master dealt only with the grad students who, in turn would instruct the level just below them, and so on and so forth until the lesson trickled down to me.
Our professor was G.H. Pingusson, who belonged to the same architectural movement as Robert Mallet-Stevens and Le Corbusier. A famous project of his is the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. This very moving monument is set at the eastern point of the Ile de la Cité, in the shadow of Notre-Dame de Paris. I only met G.H. a couple of times in the two years I spent at the Beaux-Arts. One time being as he rode his bicycle backwards, sitting on the handle bars in the garden behind the Grand Palais.
