Measure and Map

Abstract

In his important treatise, Les Promenades de Paris (1867–71), Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand (1817–1891) documents and celebrates the accomplishments and projects he undertook during the Second Empire. Two matched plates of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont are particularly interesting for what they reveal about Alphand’s training and design process. A contour plan shows existing and proposed topography and a rendered site plan presents the form of the park’s highpoints and circulation, features and vegetation. These maps of the Buttes Chaumont reflect a technological and political perspective of the city and the site that hints at a ciphered relationship between maps and actions. Rendered and published in a way that celebrated the production of the park, these plans are projectionsfigured renditions of a technical vision. Through the process of their production and printing as well as their specific contents these two plates explicate Alphand’s technological expertise and support Napoléon III’s emphasis on French design. The emphasis on the site’s topographic attributes proclaimed an ideological mastery over the physical surface of the earth — a message sustaining an action—that conveyed an essential tactic in Napoléon III’s agenda to proclaim French sovereignty through the convergence of art and industry in the redesign of Paris.