It did suddenly occur to me that the obstacles inherent when trying to explain why sleeping in a historic space could be of value were multiplied by any language barriers. All I could do was sit and occasionally smile in apparent agreement.
Preservation is a collaborative and, at times, an adversarial sport β even when the players involved are on the same team. I had many times been deeply engaged in this same conversation. All valuable and important concepts to define. This conversation was taking place in a room on the 3 rd floor of the Hotel Ourscamp.
Fabrice had suggested it because in the early s the Hotel Ourscamp was one of the first buildings to gain notoriety due to the preservation efforts that surrounded it. It would make a fascinating study of the long-term sustainability of preservation efforts. The building, the street, as well as the Parisian precinct it rests within all have a somewhat complicated architectural and social history.
The animated conversation of preservation history notwithstanding, this complicated history is one of the very reasons that makes the Hotel Ourscamp so compelling. The neighborhood surrounding the Hotel Ourscamp is full of narrow roads, buildings buckling toward you, and steep stairs. This area of Paris, now called the 4 th arrondissement, contains some of the oldest surviving Medieval structures and urban street configurations of all Paris.
But it nearly came to existing only on old maps. Tracing this story provided me with a contextual urban narrative to dovetail with the particular narrative of the Hotel Ourscamp. Amazingly, much of the street system of the 4 th arrondissement is recognizable even today. It shows in amazing detail the built urban environment of medieval Paris. If you zoom into the area that is now the 4 th District, you can identify the very block and perhaps building of the original Ourscamp Abbey outpost house.
