Paris

I’m on a plane back to New York, and a single week in Paris has changed how I think about beauty, architecture, and the way our environment shapes us.

The last museum I visited was the Musée Picasso in the Marais. On the wall, a sentence by André Breton stopped me: « La beauté sera convulsive ou ne sera pas. » Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be. It felt like a one-line summary of the city.

Parisian beauty starts from the outside. The facades follow a disciplined rhythm: pale stone, wrought-iron balconies, slate roofs. Even when you see the same elements again and again, it does not feel generic. In the central arrondissements, modern buildings exist, but they are rare enough that you notice them immediately. The streets are narrow but not suffocating, just tight enough that you slow down, pay attention, and move at a human pace. The traffic is not great, but the city does not feel built for cars. Most days there is no real reason to get into a vehicle. You walk. Once you commit to walking, the city changes. Distances shrink. Corners turn into small destinations. After a few days, you stop feeling like you are crossing Paris and feel more like you are actually inside it.

Running in the early mornings made these differences even clearer. In New York, at 5:30 a.m., Central Park already has a steady flow of runners. Coffee shops and bakeries open around 6:30 or 7:00, and the city’s “spots” are spread out in a way that rarely overwhelms your senses. Paris was almost the opposite. Life starts later. The sun often rose around 8:30 a.m., and daily life seemed to adjust to that. I would see a handful of runners, a few bakeries already open or lifting their shutters, no lines yet, just a few regulars. On narrow streets, different cafés and bakeries sometimes share the same corner, so as you run or walk past, you pass through overlapping smells: bread baking, pastries finishing, coffee starting. It is a quiet but intense kind of sensory awareness. And the main landmarks do not feel remote. You can run around the Louvre, loop through the gardens, circle the Eiffel Tower. These places are not kept at a distance. They are designed to be used. That proximity changes how you relate to them.

What struck me most was the double life of the buildings. They are historical on the outside and modern on the inside. Museums, boutiques, restaurants, and apartments all live inside structures that have not changed much in decades or centuries. It feels less like the past being erased by the present and more like both sitting on top of each other. You walk through a door under a 19th-century façade and enter a world of Wi-Fi, clean lines, induction stoves, and LED lighting. History is not a separate “district”; it is the shell of everyday life.

As I moved through different arrondissements – the 6th, 7th, 8th, 2nd, 11th, 20th, the Marais – two words kept coming back to me: intentionality and craft. Cafés, boulangeries, and brasseries share a recognizable Parisian style, yet each one tries to be itself. The chairs and tables look familiar, but the colors, menus, and small details are different. You recognize the type of place immediately, but you do not feel like you are in a copy-paste version of the last one.

Sitting outside was another constant. In the late afternoon and evening, terraces fill with people who are not in a rush. Friends talk, watch the street, and stretch out time with simple pleasures: a glass of red wine that matches the cold, bread with good butter, a few plates to share. In the same bar you see students, office workers, older couples, and groups of friends. Different generations share the same space without fuss. It feels normal rather than staged.

The way the French shop for food fits into the same logic. You do not usually go to one big supermarket and solve everything in one go. Cheese comes from the fromagerie. Meat from the boucherie. Bread from the boulangerie. Pastries from the pâtisserie. Chocolate from the chocolatier. This is not the most “efficient” way to shop if your only metric is time, but it is a deliberate tradeoff. Each shopkeeper is a specialist. Each product is an expression of skill and pride. The customer is not just buying convenience; they are engaging with a system where standards on both sides are high. The expert takes their craft seriously, and the customer expects that. As a result, it is genuinely hard to eat badly in Paris, even when you are trying something foreign.

Being there naturally made me compare it with New York and question where modern architecture and urban planning are headed. In New York, towers like the new JPMorgan building are discussed in terms of size, engineering complexity, and what they represent financially. In Paris, another question came into focus for me: if we are already investing billions into building these structures, why is “beauty” not treated as a basic requirement instead of an afterthought? Why is it acceptable to build such dominant objects in the landscape without asking how they feel to live around?

At the same time, I need to be honest about how narrow my sample was. I stayed in a pleasant central neighborhood, spent my days running along the Seine, visiting museums, working from cafés, and eating in good restaurants. I did not spend time in the banlieues. I did not see the less polished parts of the region. I know France has real issues: unemployment, political tension, immigration debates, housing problems, economic stress. All of that exists alongside what I experienced. This reflection is accurate for the specific slice of Paris I moved through, not for the entire country. It would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

Before this trip, I had often heard that France’s mix of capitalism and social democracy had pushed it into stagnation or decadence. Walking around Paris, that story did not match what I was seeing. I saw students, professionals, families, and retirees sharing sidewalks, parks, and cafés. New bars, concept stores, galleries, and restaurants were clearly doing well. In the areas I visited, visible poverty was rare, and I felt safer walking at night than I usually do in many parts of New York. That does not make the problems disappear, but it does suggest that broad claims about “decay” miss something. The contrast between the language used in commentary and the reality on the ground is sharp. The missing explanation probably sits in places I did not see and in tradeoffs that are not obvious on a short visit.

One thing became clear to me: we shape our environment, but then it quietly shapes us back. If you work every day in a faceless glass tower, that changes your baseline for what “normal” looks like. If your only interaction with your city is through subway tunnels, office lobbies, and wide roads built mainly for cars, that affects your sense of community and public space. In Paris, the design of streets, buildings, and public areas still seems to start from a basic question: what kind of life does this place allow people to live? In many newer developments elsewhere, the first questions seem to be about cost, yield, and speed.

My conclusion is less about deciding whether France or the United States “does it better” and more about how different environments make you feel as a person moving through them. New York has an intensity and ambition that Paris does not try to replicate. Paris offers everyday beauty and slowness that New York rarely prioritizes. I am not claiming to judge which system is superior. I am noticing that each city pushes me into a different state of mind. New York makes me think faster, move faster, and reach higher. Paris made me notice more, taste more, and relate to time differently.

A week is not enough to understand a city fully, especially one with as many layers as Paris. It is enough, though, to sense the difference when a place is built on the idea that beauty and craft matter, and that the way we inhabit space quietly shapes the kind of people we become.

I am going back to New York with tired legs from all the running, a suitcase that smells faintly of butter and cheese, and one question stuck in my head: if we already know how to build cities that make people feel this alive, why do we so often choose not to?