L'Immeuble Mouchotte
How a 700+ unit building can feel like a village
We had visited Paris many times over the years and I’d often performed here while living in Amsterdam a lifetime ago. But passing through and inhabiting a city are two very different experiences and, I’m pleased to say, we’re enjoying living here even more than visiting. We love our apartment, our building, our neighborhood, the bustle of the city, the lovely parks, and the endless choices of bakery, bistro, and brasserie. We’re not so crazy about the pigeons, the omnipresent street (re)construction and sound of jackhammers, and the pollution emanating from all the smokers and vapers. But, hey, it’s a Grande Ville Européenne, so that comes with the territory.
As I mentioned in a previous post, the architectural style of L’Immeuble Mouchotte, designed by Jean Dubuisson in 1959 and completed in 1964, is about as far as you can get from an iconic Haussmann building, and plenty of people find it downright ugly. Rising above the Gare Montparnasse (Montparnasse railway station), the façade is flat, devoid of balconies or any type of architectural decoration. But, if you take a closer look, you’ll see plenty of variations in color and texture thanks to the residents’ choices of curtains and shades. And the geometrical pattern of the floor to ceiling windows reminds me a bit of a Mondrian painting. (I’m not sure what the two figures in this photo are doing, but they’re not washing the windows.)
Our apartment checks the three boxes that Parisians love: it’s très lumineux (very light), traversant (windows at both front and back), and there are no vis-à-vis (no buildings close enough for people to look in). I was disappointed at first that there’s no balcony — not even a typical one that can only hold a tiny table and two folding chairs — but its absence is more than made up by our “backyard”: The Jardin Atlantique. This garden — really an 8.6 acre/ 3.5 hectare park — was plopped right onto the roof of the Gare Montparnasse in 1994 and is a great place to hang out while waiting for a train. That is, if you can discover it. I’ve been stopped on the street many times by people pulling suitcases, puzzled how to find the entrance to the garden.
See that thing in the middle of this photo? It’s an elevator which, as far as I know, hasn’t worked for years. See the arrow sticking out of its right flank? It says Jardin Atlantique. The bridge does, indeed, take you under L’Immeuble Mouchotte to a staircase leading up to the garden. But, since the elevator doesn’t work, you first have to find the staircase up to the bridge on the elevator side of the rue du Commandant René Mouchotte. And I’m not going to bother explaining that to you unless you’ll soon be heading to Paris. There are at least three other entrances, including a private one from our building and one from inside the Gare Montparnasse, but these are equally well hidden. I think we’d been living here a month by the time we found them all.
The bright side (selfishly, for us) is that the garden is never busy and really does feel like our personal backyard. I take our elevator down to the Terrasse, go out the back gate and up the stairs, and there I am.
L’Immeuble Mouchotte, in spite of its enormity — 754 apartments in a building more than 200m long and 18 floors high — is often described by its residents as a village, which puzzled me at first. But it’s true, thanks to some ingenious architectural choices. First of all, if you’re walking on our side of rue Mouchotte, you won’t even realize there’s an apartment building hiding in plain sight behind the massive wall dotted with entrances to parking garages and the railway station. The street level entrance, just a few meters and numerous clouds of cigarette smoke from the escalator into the station, is entirely unobtrusive, and the number 8 barely visible, particularly at night.
Anyone can enter by pressing a button on the automatic door — and many people mistakenly do so in search of the public parking garage. Inside the small foyer are two elevators that descend to the building’s private parking garage and ascend only two floors, past the cave — the gigantic basement of storage units — to the rez-de-chaussée (ground floor), indicated by the RDC button. But wait: this “ground floor” is two floors above street level! Indeed, and that’s the genius of this building. You exit the elevator at RDC, wave hello to the security officer, and emerge onto a terrace that runs the entire length of the building. About 4 meters wide plus a sidewalk, the terrace is where delivery vehicles and moving vans park, but only briefly, so it’s usually empty of vehicles, which is very pleasant. Even more pleasant is the large communal potager (vegetable garden) with its huge composting bins. (More in a future post on the potager and on the “Mouchotte block party” which took place on the terrace.)
Instead of one main entrance to the building and hotel-like corridors running the entire length, there are thirteen entrances, or escaliers, marked A through M, each consisting of a short staircase leading from the terrace to a glass entrance door. This design choice, imo, is the most influential in creating the feeling of a village in what is, in fact, the largest residential building in Paris. Each entrance door brings you to the foyer of a vertical segment of the building, serviced by its own elevators. And although each of the 13 escaliers accesses the full 18 floors, there are only three apartments per floor, therefore 51 apartments total. Moreover, the two elevators in each foyer are marked PAIR (even) and IMPAIR (odd), reducing by half how many floors are serviced by each elevator. (Does anyone reading this know of a similar system anywhere in the US?)
Within a couple of weeks, we were seeing familiar faces in the foyer and on our elevator. Within another week or two, we were having conversations with our neighbors. And by the end of the first month, Pieter had joined the compost and vegetable garden committee.
I’m attaching the link to the Mouchotte/ Gare Montparnasse video again because it now has English subtitles! (And because the guy is super cute.)
Fascinating and how fortunate you twomust feel to have been dropped into this village in the middle of Paris. Keep writing, keep running and we miss you in GGP.
Maggie
Haha - I watched the video before the subtitles (I can pretend I know French!)