On Rue Sursock, the finest buildings do not shout their arrival. They hold a line of shade over the pavement, then release small signs: a gold fan above a doorway, a cobalt shutter half closed, a balcony grille bent into letters no one needs to read aloud.
The ornament is not nostalgia
What looks decorative is often a civic machine. The horizontal bands cool the facade, the rounded corners soften the corner wind, and the ironwork lets a family be public without surrendering the room behind them.
The city’s best modernism learned manners from the sea: direct, luminous, and never entirely severe.