Frog & Fog (IV)
Renovating an old house often meant tearing out the original decor, exposing the rotten, dilapidated structure beneath its glossy exterior.
Traditional Parisian stone buildings from the era of Napoleon III were stone on the outside and wood on the inside. After more than a century, some developed foundation problems, while others had issues with their supporting pillars—perhaps they had rotted from dampness or been hollowed out by termites. At that point, the owner had two choices: repair it or tear it down and rebuild.
The Louvre Museum would undoubtedly choose restoration. Even if repairs cost more than rebuilding, the work required professionals to restore it bit by bit with the utmost care. At such times, they would replace the original wooden structure with reinforced concrete. After all, most outsiders only looked at the surface. As long as the exterior remained unchanged, there would be no objections.
Other old buildings were not so fortunate. If there was no budget and a municipal project such as subway construction happened to come along, they would simply be demolished and rebuilt. Austerlitz Railway Station was one of the luckier ones. Its railway functions had already been distributed among Paris's other five stations, while the unused sections would be converted for other purposes, such as galleries of anatomy and paleontology, filled with specimens of animal skeletons. Unlike the human bones in the Paris Catacombs, which had been artificially sorted into leg bones, skulls, and so on, then arranged into geometric patterns by priests, these animal skeletons largely retained the forms they had in life, much like the dinosaur skeletons at the British Museum.
The cement Pierre Brongniart provided was naturally not the cheap kind of concrete. This high-end cement required no plastering, suspended ceilings, wallpaper, or wall paint; it could be