A Pigeon's Eye View of Paris

Patrice Rambaud aka 'L'œil du pigeon' is a trained architect and talented urban illustrator with a fantastic eye for Paris. He has already self-published an atmospheric and offbeat look at the city's 20th arrondissement - but he needs your help to complete the other 19 districts!

I Remember When This Will All Be Trees

A visit to what will become, in 2014, the city's first forest.

You need a lot of imagination to visualise a forest in this location. It looks more like an oversight or a service road, squeezed between what was until recently a wasteland and the city's périphérique motorway. The wasteland - or friche - has given way to a strip of modern office blocks and a new multi-screen cinema that will open in a couple of months time, but the motorway still announces its presence with a continuous rumble.

On Cities and Silence

After publishing books on the quiet corners of London and Amsterdam, artist and writer Siobhan Wall has now focussed her attentions on Paris. I ask her what attracts her at once to cities and silence, and why quietness is so important to her.

Marcel Hennequet: An Uncelebrated Poet of Paris

The name Marcel Hennequet may be largely forgotten in Paris today, but it is engraved into some of the most imaginative interwar buildings in the city.

What links the Boulevard Periere in the 17th with the Rue Scheffer in the 16th? The answer is a set of twin buildings, both designed by the architect Marcel Hennequet, and both wearing a particularly innovative material.

Life Begins at 40: Has the Olympiades Development Reached Maturity?

No other part of Paris has undergone such a radical transformation as the 13th arrondissement in the last 50 years, and nowhere is this more visible than at the Olympiades development, celebrating its 40th birthday this year. But have these transformations been successful?

Rarely has a shopping centre been less appropriately named than the Centre Commercial Oslo. Sandwiched at the heart of the Olympiades development, it is home to a strip of Asian restaurants and stores. Alongside the original signage - sporting hellenic-inspired font in Greek blues and whites - Chinese lanterns hang from the false ceilings, and gaudy baubles flash in shop windows.