Since I first saw them last summer I’ve been interested in the system of corridors and courtyards, called “traboules,” that intersperse Lyon’s dense old city blocks. Apparently they were developed during heavy involvement in the silk trade, when it paid to have quick access to the riverfront…..but I must say, that explanation absolutely pales before the architectural phenomenon it supposedly spawned…so I’ll have to get back to you. Regardless of their impetus, the traboules are a coy, internalized attraction; virtuoso stereotomic displays that usher light, air, and dynamism to the block’s internal microcosm and whose only external traces are the periodic narrow doorways dotting each block.
Those doorways presented a considerable frustration until I made the brilliant discovery (i.e. some French guy showed me) that the “service” button opened each and every one without the least bit of resistance. Instant gratification from there on out. In the narrow streets I was jowl-to-jowl with tourists, schoolchildren, and miserably oversized delivery trucks … but once each door closed behind me I entered my own magical world of spiral stairs and anthropomorphic vaulting.
I chose one particularly rich block, which I’ve colored red in the top two pictures above, to bound my investigation. Note its breadth and spiky heterogeneity, marked as it is by multitudinous chimneys and stair towers. One particularly agile traboule courses completely through but twenty or so others inject themselves an average of forty or fifty feet in before turning vertical and dissipating around their courtyards’ perimeter.
As was the case with Bologna’s porticos, Lyon’s traboules find their apotheosis into high design through the hands of an esteemed architect—in this case, Philibert du l’Orme. The first two images depict two tight traboule courtyards in the same block. The image on the left depicts the bottom of a projecting gallery (upper right), the intersection of a spiral stair and a corridor (straight ahead), and double squinches supporting a complexly vaulted gallery to the left. The central image shows a stack of broad galleries abutting the circular tower of a spiral stair. These are two elegant but typical examples of the traboule typology, which du l’Orme digests and redeploys in the courtyard to the right. In the upper tiers du l’Orme applies the classical orders with Bramante-esque precision, while in the lower sections he hops and skips around pre-existing conditions with geometric and curvaceous acuity. The result is a remarkable site-specific flexibility and organic articulation gleaned from the problem-solving methods previously employed in the surrounding urban tissue. Incidentally, Du l’Orme’s design sensibility, thus developed, set the norm for next generation of French architects.
*Top image scanned from Raymond Chevallier's France from the Air
