Detail View: Archivision Base to Module 9: Hôtel de Ville, Paris

Preferred Title: 
Hôtel de Ville, Paris
Alternate Title: 
City Hall, Paris
Image View: 
Detail view of three statues (of famous Parisians), on main elevation, left of centre
Creator: 
Domenico da Cortona (Italian architect, ca. 1470-ca. 1549); Pierre Joseph Edouard Deperthes (French architect, 1833-1898); Theodore Ballu (French architect, 1817-1885)
Location: 
site: Paris, Île-de-France, France
Location Note: 
4th arrondissement; Place de l'Hôtel de Ville (formerly the Place de Grève)
GPS: 
+48.856389+2.352222
Date: 
1532-1628 (creation); rebuilt 1873-1892 (other)
Cultural Context: 
French
Style Period: 
Nineteenth century; Renaissance; Renaissance Revival
Work Type 1: 
city hall
Classification: 
architecture
Material: 
stone
Technique: 
carving (processes); construction (assembling)
Subjects: 
architecture; Restoration and conservation; Revolutionaries; Uprising of 1871; communards
Description: 
The Hôtel de Ville (French for "City Hall") in Paris, France, is the building housing the City of Paris's administration; it has been the location of the municipality of Paris since 1357. In 1871, the Paris Commune chose the Hôtel de Ville as its headquarters, and as anti-Commune troops approached the building, Commune extremists set fire to the Hôtel de Ville destroying almost all extant public records from the French Revolutionary period. The blaze gutted the building, leaving only a stone shell. Reconstruction of the hall lasted from 1873 through 1892 and was directed by architects Théodore Ballu and Édouard Deperthes following an architectural contest. The architects rebuilt the interior of the Hôtel de Ville within the stone shell that had survived the fire. While the rebuilt Hôtel de Ville is, from the outside, a copy of the 16th-century French Renaissance building (the central block) that stood before 1871, the new interior was based on an entirely new design, with ceremonial rooms lavishly decorated i
Image Description: 
Some 230 sculptors were commissioned to produce 338 individual figures of famous Parisians on each facade. The sculptors included prominent academicians like Ernest-Eugène Hiolle and Henri Chapu, but easily the most famous was Auguste Rodin. Rodin produced the figure of the 18th-century mathematician Jean le Rond d'Alembert, finished in 1882.
Collection: 
Archivision Addition Module Five
Identifier: 
1A2-F-P-HV-A5
Rights: 
© Scott Gilchrist, Archivision, Inc.