*the place and its context cropped by a 1,500' x 1,500' frame. Lines in red represent building plans I have collected thus far.
The plaza, originally Place Royale, was designed by Baptiste du Cerceau under Henri IV and completed in 1612. Behind a unified façade punctuated by the king and queen’s axial personal pavilions, individual properties were given loose rein. Hence, a host of architects participated in the development’s realization despite its single-hand appearance.
In Collage City, Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter refer to Place des Vosges as a “stabilizer”, a spatially-centering structured enclave anchoring a larger locale. The square’s grand geometric void stands out against the small-scale row houses and small palaces of the surrounding Marais district, grounding and centering small-scale landowner and home-owner operations in a clearly ordered pattern.
Though the Place is not connected to a major urban artery it does yield one of its sides to a minor throughway, shown in the image to the left. Here, to the north, the place’s façade lies flush with the Parisian fabric, its residential depth embedded and its loggia capped by flanking storefronts. Without the three other walls off-camera to the left, this royal construction could seem to be but a pleasant private development.
The image to the right shows two of those other walls and the family-friendly park space they surround, chaperoned by fountains and foliage. Green seems to do more in Paris than it does elsewhere. Here, a dense, nearly continuous belt of green three trees deep buffers encircling traffic, shelters park benches, and renders the communal dimension more intimate without interrupting the ground plane or obstructing the facades’ rhythm beyond.
*Top image scanned from Leonardo Benevolo's The History of the City, pg. 655
*the place and its context cropped by a 1,500' x 1,500' frame. Lines in red represent building plans I have collected thus far.
The plaza, originally Place Royale, was designed by Baptiste du Cerceau under Henri IV and completed in 1612. Behind a unified façade punctuated by the king and queen’s axial personal pavilions, individual properties were given loose rein. Hence, a host of architects participated in the development’s realization despite its single-hand appearance. 
