ABSTRACT
Palais Royal, formerly Palais Cardinale, is a formal enclosed garden just north of the Louvre in central Paris. Designed originally as a palace for Cardinal Richelieu by architect Jacques Lemercier in 1635, it was transformed into a public space in the late eighteenth century. Part of this transformation was the introduction of a thin layer of colonnaded buildings on the inside edge of the gardens that would regulate and give order to the space. Though in the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth century it was associated with the tawdry side of life, today the gardens are a quiet repose in central Paris. As Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter remark in Collage City, the garden is an “instrument of field recognition, an identifiable stabilizer and a means of collective orientation” in Paris (Rowe and Koetter 1978: 82-83).
