A paradox in the Paris urban facade management

Paris is one of the most fascinating and most popular cities for tourism attraction in the world. Paris not only obtains its charm for its valuable historic buildings and signs value, but also the city itself is a cause of tourism attraction. This city is distinguished from other tourism destination by offering unity of space and integrated management. Pedestrian spaces, human scale, sin river stations and performances on the street makes the strolling in streets and watching the facades more exciting than entering the buildings. Paris consists of two quite distinct parts: the historic and modern sectors. A coordinated, integrated and monotone Parisian architecture is observed in the historic sector while the modern sector offers international style of architecture which can be seen in many other European cities. There is no influence of modernity and modern architecture in the historic city centre. The sin river acts as an interface of these sectors and its sides have been organized in different places according to the context. This policy has protected the historical heritage and has conveyed all the innovations and "internationalisms" to distant locations. But does this maximum detachment seem as pleasant to the citizens as others? Strict determination of managers in holding conservative policies of urban managers is quite obvious in the landscape and urban facade of Paris. This urban facade has accomplished through decades of conservative management and in particular the shaping and implementation of façadism in the city. It seems that what façadism has offered in three aesthetic, functional and cultural-identity aspects have converge in creating a type of “dualism” in urban landscape of Paris which can be classified as following: Maximum contrast between the aesthetics stated by managers and visual city division; Life in two completely separate and unconnected sectors and even hided from each other (life in urban open spaces and life within buildings); Absence of identity in Paris due to equipollent modern and historic sectors This paper tries to root out and analyze the influences of façadism on urban landscape of Paris and refers them to cited existing documents, studies and criticisms to accomplish its purpose.