Linnéa Rollenhagen Tilly: Paris - 2000 years of architecture and urban history

Using Paris as an out-door class-room is an extraordinary experience! Beside specific information upon the Parisian architecture and urban factory I try to initiate students to observe their built environment: how and why did todays buildings and urban compositions turn out this way? Not only monuments, but also functional and ordinary structures are essential in the urban factor.

This page will hopefully evolve with time - in a first stage I suggest a brief bibliography (architecture & urbanism in general) and as an introduction to Paris architecture and urbanism a chronological list with a selection of web-links:

Bruno Zevi "Apprendre à voir l'architecture"
S.E. Rasmussen "Experiencing architecture"
Fredrik F. Wulz "Fasaden och stadsrummet".

Looking at Buildings Glossary
Glossary for Medieval Art & Architecture

Andrew Ayers, The Architecture of Paris,
D. Thompson, Renaissance Paris
A. Braham, "Architecture of the French Enlightenment

Cité de l'architecture
Musée des Plans et Reliefs

The making of Paris
Paris architecture
Paris maps
Paris "water"
Paris "métro"
Paris underground

Before Lutetia
Lutetia
Musée Cluny
Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Saint-Denis, abbey & city
Notre-Dame
Sainte-Chapelle
Sainte Chapelle virtual visit
ïle de la Cité in the medieval times, virtual tour
Château Vincennes
Tour Jean sans Peur
Louvre
Le Marais
Le Val-de-Grâce
Hôtel des Invalides
Plan Bretez/Turgot
Saint-Sulpice
Versailles: Le Petit Trianon
Panthéon
Paris catacombs
Paris before & after Haussmann
A Modern Sewer system
Opéra Garnier
immeubles Haussmanniens
Hôtel de Ville
Gustave Eiffel
Construction of the Eiffel Tower
Architecture in Musée d'Orsay
Le grand Palais
Le Petit Palais
Le grand palais
World Fair 1900
Musée d'Orsay
Construction Métro
Hector Guimard
Villa La Roche
Villa Savoye
Robert Mallet Stevens
Construction of the CNIT at la Défense
La tour Montparnasse est belle!
Centre Pompidou
Social housings by Portzamparc
Francois Mitterrand & Paris
Grands Travaux François Mitterrand
Institut du Monde Arabe
The Battle of the Pyramid
Opéra Bastille
Pei about the Louvre Pyramid
Bercy prototypes
Paris ZAC Rive Gauche
Passerelle Simone de Beauvoir
Tom Mayne - Morphosis tower
La Défense - projects
Project Tour Phare La Défense
La Défense - EPAD
La Gaïté Lyrique conception
Les halles - history
Les Halles before
La Canopée - Les Halles tomorrow
La Philarmonie de Paris
Triangle 2017 ?
Projet Triangle
Fondation Louis Vuitton
Le Front de Seine project
Front de Seine SEMARELP
le grand pari(s)
Tout savoir sur le grand Paris

Linnéa Rollenhagen Tilly

As an Art Historian, I am teaching Urban and Architectural history as French 19th century painting. My teaching focus upon the making of art and architecture (actors as social contexts or constraints), thus not only the aesthetical aspects, but also the observation and questioning of the built environment and the reasons behind the makng of a piece of art. As much as possible I include field studies in museums and the city of Paris.

Associated research fellow at AUSser-ATTHEP and HISTARA, I am specialized in 17th and 18th century French and Swedish architecture and construction history. I received a PhD from the Paris-Sorbonne IV university in 2006.
In my MA thesis I reconstituted the history of the construction of the quays in Toulouse (1760-1790), the organization of a public building site in the 18th century, practical issues, professions involved, the reshaping of an old urban feature and the reception of the project (critics upon of its utility). A research that has been summarized in several articles.
In my PhD thesis, "Ordinary houses in Paris, 1650-1790", I draw the architectural and functional features of ordinary houses in Paris. Based on archive studies (texts and iconography), the analyzis focuses on the functions, the making, the materials and interior planning system of a broad panel of buildings that rarely survived time and were adapted to the user’s needs. This research is also displayed in several articles.

Since 2007 as a freelance researcher I've been studing the Swedish superintendant Carl Johan Cronstedt, his activities as an organisator and architect. Several articles summarizes parts of these researches as a book published in 2017 (Balkong Förlag in Stockholm, Sweden). A first biography, tracing the content of Cronstedts European training in architecture, his professional network and chosen parts of his professional activities in Sweden (housings, bridges and churches). The book is based on an exceptional material giving new insights in the making of an European architects’ library and thus his education.
Through these projects my interest for French-Swedish professional networks (master-models and materials), the transfer of French models to Sweden and the drawing of a Swedish National style has awaken. Which notably led to published texts upon other French-Swedish architects: Carl Wijnblad, Carl Henric König, F.A.U. Cronstedt, Antoine Desgodets as Simon and Jean de la Vallée. My ongoing research project "Knowledge and Friendships: French-Swedish networking in architecture and construction technology, 17th & 18th centuries" I am mapping travel of craftsmen and their families, their education and apprenticeships, networks, friendships and activities on the European continent and in Scandinavia through the 17th and 18th centuries. How collective exchanges and innovations contributed to improve heating systems (the Swedish stove) and brick coatings, for example. My contributions to the Dictionnaire des femmes créatrices (édition des femmes, 2013) led to a deeper insight into the late acceptation of women as architects, through a Scandinavian perspective (Sweden and Norway). More recently the co-writing of a book dealing with the architecture in Versailles in the first decades of the 20th century - Versailles 1900-1930 (éd. AAM, 2021) - widened further my knowledge by discovering unpublished documentation on a very productive and quite unknown period in the making of this city.