Every morning last autumn, I walked past the Abbesses entrance on my way to the office in Montmartre. It took three weeks before I actually stopped to look at it. Not glance — look. The green cast iron rose from the sidewalk like something between a plant and a cathedral, its tendrils curving upward to hold glass panels that caught the grey Paris light and turned it amber. I stood there for twenty minutes, blocking pedestrians, and understood for the first time what Guimard meant when he insisted that a staircase could be a poem.
The Grammar of Wrought Iron
Between 1900 and 1912, Guimard made structure and ornament read as one: iron rails, lamp buds, and glass canopies behaving like a botanical machine.