Paris - La Géode - 19e

Plate XCVI – La Geode …

So much of what you’ll see in Paris is old. It’s not that there is nothing new or modern about the city. Whether your idea of 'new' is Sacré Couer, Pei’s Pyramid, Centre Pompidou, the Grande Arche, or even a belief that with Sarkozy’s vision of a Grand Paris will come an entirely new modernity, much of the charm of the city is the way that the ancient, the merely old and the new live so compatibly side-by-side. Paris has carefully and guardedly managed to avoid obscuring its heritage of beauty through meticulous city planning (starting perhaps with Hausmann’s strategic layouts), and our appreciation of all the city has to offer is the better for it. Simply compare the claustrophobia inducing twentieth century development of London and you’ll know what I mean.

Moving to the edges of the city’s north east is the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie better known simply as La Vilette. Apart from wanting to see the numerous permanent and temporary exhibitions I had another calling to this part of the city. My family name is Macdonald and coincidentally the Cité is found a few short metres away from a stretch of the greater Paris boulevard system known as Boulevard MacDonald. I was delighted to discover that the name means more to Parisians than hamburgers and fries! (It is of course the name of the Napoleonic Marechal, Étienne Jacques Joseph Alexandre MacDonald, 1st Duc de Taranto).

Set aside in 1979 as the world’s largest museum of science and technology, La Vilette is worthy of a couple of separate visits to take it all in. Amongst the attractions is the Imax theatre housed inside an eye catching thirty six metre diameter steel dome known as La Géode. The only Parisian cinema at the time showing this incredible format (how long before Imax 3D?) the dome is fabricated from some 6500 steel triangular plates.

With many of the exhibits aimed at the younger generation, and a plethora of thematic parks and gardens, La Vilette is rightfully a popular, but I thought somewhat underappreciated day out destination for the whole family.