{"id":5330,"date":"2007-11-06T07:45:03","date_gmt":"2007-11-06T07:45:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5330"},"modified":"2007-11-06T07:45:03","modified_gmt":"2007-11-06T07:45:03","slug":"paris-from-the-moon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=5330","title":{"rendered":"Paris from the moon"},"content":{"rendered":"

When we were in Paris last week, I wondered what’s behind the facades of the big buildings that line the boulevards. The reason I wondered is that most of the blocks of Paris are oblongs or triangles formed of large buildings, with no breaks for visible alleys. A triangle leaves a lot of space near the middle–in contrast, for example, to the narrow rectangular blocks of Manhattan. If you fill a triangle with buildings, no light will reach most of the interior–especially near the middle of each block, where the shape is widest.<\/p>\n

Thanks to Google Earth, one can see what is going on from above. The picture to the left shows the block where my wife and I stayed last week. Like most of the blocks of the Right Bank, it is actually filled with trees. Paris is a much greener city than you can tell by walking its streets, but half of the green is private and hidden behind the lovely stone facades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When we were in Paris last week, I wondered what’s behind the facades of the big buildings that line the boulevards. The reason I wondered is that most of the blocks of Paris are oblongs or triangles formed of large buildings, with no breaks for visible alleys. A triangle leaves a lot of space near […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}