One of the most brilliant things about Paris is that the city is too ambitious to be consumed by mere glitz and glamour. After several failures, and a disastrous 1980s in terms of supposedly modern facades and pretentious architecture, Paris now builds buildings that subordinate their appearance to the harmony and proportion of the streets they surround. What a relief. The new buildings bring back the tones of limestone (off-white), zinc roofs, and Haussmannian windows, which are wide and tall enough to fill a dining room wall like a painting, but never disrupt the balance between solid and void on the facade. All of this allows those who stroll, appreciating visual coherence, to enjoy streets where it's barely possible to discern where one building begins and another ends. There aren't enough hours of sunlight to wander through Paris and imagine what three or four solid principles would make for a good new street in a newly built neighborhood.

The FAVB has made strong objections against the modification of the General Metropolitan Plan (PGM) for the future Thyssen Museum, and reading them has made me think about the grand ideas that have governed the construction of Barcelona as a compact city. Cities are ideas, some conceived decades ago, that urban plans preserve or alter, even if they don't please everyone.