If you go to the Sorbonne when it is closed, or any of the major schools in Paris, including Ecole des Beaux Arts, you will find it difficult to find a single piece of information about it. The hours, administrative offices, course schedules, anything. Even when the doors are open, you usually need to know where to go. There are rarely maps, directions, etc. In fact, at the Sorbonne, there is no graffiti, no posters, no announcements of bands, nothing that would indicate a college; the walls are remarkably blank. Ironically, once you enter the Ecole des Beaux Arts, there is graffiti everywhere, but it consists primarily of tags
Despite frequent claims to be “open” to all, these buildings can be off-putting. Sometimes it can be difficult to even figure out where the entrance may be. The design itself suggests, if you don’t know, you shouldn’t be there.
Even those buildings which are supposedly open to the public have a design which controls access. Supposedly the Francois Mitterand national library, which consists of four towers, is meant to resemble open books. Instead the four towers make it look like a castle, and, for me, it strikes echoes of the Bastille. It’s imposing with its entrances underground. Even when a person has figured out how to get inside, access is limited until she or he has registered, gotten a reader’s id (for a fee), and negotiated a system of turnstiles.
Educational reforms in the wake of the Mai protests were supposed to increase access; the architecture itself suggests this has not happened. And while there exists a stereotype now of students taking to the streets and marching around outside, inside the university, on a structural level, few changes would seem to have been made. The issues that originally impelled the students to protest – over-crowded classrooms, lack of resources, increasing tests, a class structure, a sense of disconnection and irrelevance – still dominate.
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