Remapping Paris: Maisons Lafitte
Remapping Paris: Maisons Lafitte
Jonathan Reeve Price, Maisons-Lafitte, 2018, Giclée print, 40" x 22" (101.6 x 55.88 cm)
As I look deep into the computer screen, pointing at the commune of Maisons-Laffitte, an enlarged section of the map appears behind me, floating in its own odd window.
At one touch, I removed the color from the original Michelin map, in their Atlas Routier. And then I snared a rectangle of the bleached, expanded, tangle of lines and labels around the commune of Maisons-Laffitte. That blocks out my right shoulder.
I love this severe analysis, the draining of subtlety, showing the penmanship of the map makers, the incredible complexity of each square, with names tucked into, behind, between streets, the circled C indicating, yes, this is a commune, the little blips and blobs indicating, I do not know what.
How to measure all this? Where can we put our feet down? We do not have a solid foreground, as in Renaissance pictures. The computer screen defies the searching eye. I've solidified the image by putting it on paper.
But the uncertainty rises over me. On top of the whole image, the lacework of streets, blown up beyond all recognition, floats in front of me, in front of the images on my wall, on top of the tape measure. How can we capture a space that has so many levels, overlays, and intersections?
History is like that.
Maisons-Laffitte is a commune on the left bank of the Seine, just west of the Forest of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, about 18 kilometers (a little over 11 miles) Northwest of Paris. The site was occupied by the Romans in the first century, setting up large estates, or mansiones, from which we get the word Maisons.
In 1640, René de Longueil started building a luxurious chateau worthy of receiving the king on visits
The chateau was completed in 1650, but Longueil devoted another twenty years to creating huge stables, large gardens, and a park with elaborate walkways.
In the 19th century, a former Governor of the Bank of France, and Minister of Finances under King Louis Philippe, Jacques Laffitte took over the chateau, and opened the park grounds up to make a “country village” for middle-class homeowners. He tore down the stables and used the materials to build one-family homes in a private space open to the public. In gratitude, the commune, which had been called Maisons-sur-Seine, renamed itself Maisons-Laffitte.
Median income here is now about 48,000 Euros, near the top 1% in France.
In 2018 the Mayor of Maisons-Laffitte suggested merging with the neighboring commune of Mesnil-le-Roi, but the Mayor of Mesnil-le-Roi pushed back on this idea, claiming it was just a way of meeting Maisons-Lafitte’s obligations for public housing. Neither commune had yet met the legal minimum of 25%.
Behind me, on the wall, I see the hexagrams of the I Ching. History seems like that to me, a constant shuffling of binaries, alternating between the rich and the poor, the rising and falling…and what do all these earnest endeavors leave behind? A pattern of streets, refurbished houses, barriers against the river…encapsulated and yet hidden in the map.
For more on this series, see our book, Remapping Paris:
For Kindle, Tablet, or Phone:
To follow blog posts about the series, see our blog:
https://museumzero.blogspot.com/2019/01/remapping-paris-04-maisons-laffitte.html
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