The Role of Elevated Views

Man and His World: The Role of Elevated Views By Kelly Anne Caulfield For Professor Annmarie Adams T.A. Olivier Vallerand ARCH 355 History of Architecture IV March 2010 The USSR and Thailand Pavilions at Night, with Twinkling Lights to Draw Visitors Thank you: To Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Roland Barthes for writing the works of literature that inspired this essay. To Meredith Dixon for his meticulous documentation of Expo through photography. To Professor Annmarie Adams and Carol Anne Caulfield for assistance in editing. Planners took the theme of the 1967 International and Universal Exposition (“Expo”) in Montreal, ‘Terre des Hommes’, from the novel of the same name by celebrated French writer and pilot Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In Saint-Exupéry’s ‘Terre des Hommes’, he eloquently portrays the sensation of flight through his musings on the human condition from the point of view of a young pilot in the 1920’s. His written ideas express the ability of new technology – Saint-Exupéry’s airplane – and the aerial viewpoint to enable users to understand their own environment. Pairing a bird’s-eye view and world expositions is not a new concept. The best known example is the Eiffel Tower. The Eiffel Tower was constructed for the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris and served as an entrance arch way. Visitors also took a lift to the top of the thousand foot (324 m) high iron structure to take in a panoramic view of Paris.1 In his essay entitled ‘The Eiffel Tower’, French philosopher and critic Roland Barthes examines the significance and attraction of this panoramic view. Both Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s plane and the Eiffel Tower provided new views of their surrounding environments. At Expo ‘67, this desire to see an environment from an elevated viewing point was satisfied by the Minirail. This personal enlightenment enabled by the elevated views, as described in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s early experiences of flight and Roland Barthes’ essay on the significance of the Eiffel Tower, serves as a precedent against which we can analyze the experience of Expo ‘67’s elevated Minirail. Saint-Exupéry’s novel ‘Terre des Hommes’, translated in English as ‘Wind, Sand and Stars’, presents an in-depth examination of the connection between perspective and understanding one’s environment. On a superficial level, the novel relates the life of a young pilot and the challenges he faces flying primitive airplanes on postal routes across South 1 Barthes, 2. 1 America, Europe and Africa. However his anecdotes also contain philosophical reflections relating to the human condition, namely what it means to be human and how our reactions to the events in our lives define us. Saint-Exupéry’s creative expressions of the human desire to interact caught the attention of Expo planners and eventually served as the theme for the exposition. Specifically, influential French-Canadian author Gabrielle Roy is credited with suggesting Saint-Exupéry’s ‘Terre des Hommes’ as a theme.2 In a publication by the Canadian Corporation for the 1967 World Exhibition, Roy states, “In Terre des Hommes, his haunting book, so filled with dreams and hopes for the future, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry writes of how deeply moved he was when, flying for the first time by night alone over Argentina, he happened to notice a few flickering lights scattered below him across an almost empty plain. They "twinkled here and there, alone like stars." ...In truth, being made aware of our own solitude can give us insight into the solitude of others. It can even cause us to gravitate towards one another as if to lessen our distress. Without this inevitable solitude, would there be any fusion at all, any tenderness between human beings. Moved as he was by a heightened awareness of the solitude of all creation and by the human need for solidarity, Saint- 2 Faber, Roy et al. Image: Saint-Exupéry in flight. 2 Exupéry found a phrase to express his anguish and his hope that was as simple as it was rich in meaning; and because that phrase was chosen many years later to be the governing idea of Expo 67, a group of people from all walks of life was invited by the Corporation to reflect upon it and to see how it could be given tangible form.”3 This idea of drawing people out of their personal and cultural solitude and celebrating the common threads of humanity, as well as the differences, are fundamental elements of a world exposition. Both Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s view from his airplane and the view of the Eiffel Tower acted as a human connection. Similar to Saint-Exupéry’s twinkling lights in Argentina, Barthes remarks that even as he sits writing his essay he can see “...two little lights come on, winking gently as they revolve at its very tip: all this night, too, it will be there, connecting me above Paris to each of my friends that I know are seeing it: with it we all comprise a shifting figure of which it is the steady center: the Tower is friendly.”4 Finding solace in the presence of others, even when seemingly remote, stands as an important bond between humans. Examining the human desire to connect plays a key role to understanding Saint- Exupéry’s enlightened view of the world gained through flight. From his view in the cockpit he vividly describes the scenery below, and consequently examines his own place in his environment and the landscape he is observing. In author S. Beynon John’s critical analysis of ‘Terre des Hommes’, he coins this as a state of altered consciousness: “The solitude and freedom of flying may bring out the contemplative side of his nature, making him especially attentive to his own identity, but they also bring him an altered consciousness of his relationship to the 3 Roy, 20. 4 Barthes, 3 3 planet.”5 His plane proves an important instrument to achieve this state of contemplation on his place in the world. The notion that we can gain a new understanding of our environment by observing it from above, or in a bird’s-eye perspective is expanded in Barthes’ 1964 essay.6 The Eiffel Tower enabled visitors to, for the first time, view Paris in what he calls a ‘panoramic’ view. This type of view had previously been associated with surveying nature – observing a landscape – from a high point in topography, a mountain for example. But as Barthes states, “...the Tower overlooks not nature but the city; and yet, but its very position of a visited outlook, the Tower makes the city into a kind of nature...”7 The Tower allows visitors to view Paris not as a city per say, but as a landscape – a living, breathing environment. Explorers survey a foreign landscape from elevated view points to build an understanding of what lays ahead. In the same way, the Eiffel Tower allowed visitors to prepare and strategize for what lay ahead of them. The idea of a view point to survey a landscape is a primitive one, and to simply extend it to a cityscape does not further our understanding of the significance of a bird’s-eye view. Saint- 5 Beynon, 35 6 Barthes, Copyrights 7 Barthes, 8 Image: View from the Eiffel Tower 4 Exupéry’s description of his ‘new and enlightened’ view of his environment suggests a far more intellectual meaning than just an ability to see what lay ahead of him. From his elevated view in the cockpit, Saint-Exupéry sees entire cities and civilizations as tiny blots on the landscape, which lead him to contemplate the fragility of human life. In the air, he can see how seemingly insignificant and impermanent their place on the land really is. It is much easier to comprehend an entire city being wiped out by natural and man-made disasters when it is seen in the context of the planet, or on a more comprehensive scale. Subsequently, Saint-Exupéry’s thoughts travel to the fragility of his own life. He recognizes this as a common bond between himself and the inhabitants below and feels an urge to connect with these foreign cultures. Barthes’ examination of the bird’s-eye view of Paris is more of a conceptual approach compared to Saint-Exupéry’s somewhat emotive reflections; however his analysis also strengthens the human desire to connect. Barthes writes of how, “...the marvellous mitigation of altitude the panoramic vision added an incomparable power of intellection: the bird’s eye view, which each visitor to the Tower can assume in an instant for his own, gives us the world to read and not only to perceive...” and that “...to be thrust into the midst of sensation, to perceive only a kind of tidal wave of things; the bird’s-eye view, on the contrary...permits us to transcend sensation and to see things in their structure.”8 This is a crucial idea in defining the ‘new’ view provided by the Eiffel Tower and Saint-Exupéry’s plane. Barthes suggests that the significance of the bird’s-eye view is that it allows the viewers to comprehend their environment in a more critical manner. To observe a world’s fair from the ground level is an experience of the senses. A fair is, after all, designed as an attraction and therefore must play on the senses to achieve its intended purpose. The ground view is designed to make you perceive things in a certain way, whether it be in the appreciation of a culture or 8 Barthes, 9 5 nation, the admiration of a new technology or to marvel at remnants of the past.

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