Berthier's Door

[Image: From Les spécialistes by Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin].

Back in 2006, early on a Saturday morning, artists Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin installed a new door in the city of Paris—but it was a fake door, leading nowhere, on an otherwise empty wall in the 3rd arrondissement.

[Image: From Les spécialistes by Julien Berthier and Simon Boudvin].

The project was called Les spécialistes. "The façade, using the local architectural codes, occupies 10 cm of public space," Berthier explains, "and was mounted and glued on in thirty minutes."

[Images: From Les spécialistes].

Unbelievably, Berthier adds, "Almost 4 years later, the address still exists. Regularly graffitied it is even cleaned by the city service.”

[Image: Les spécialistes seen in 2009; its co-creator, Julien Berthier, has a flair for secret doors].

In a way, I'm reminded of an article published last month in New York magazine called "There’s a Brownstone in Brooklyn With a Secret Passage to the Subway." There, the magazine wrote that "among the lovely three-story brownstones in Brooklyn is one extra-special home, one that really isn't a home at all. It's merely a façade that serves to disguise a passage into the dark subway tunnel" below. An emergency evacuation-and-access system for the subway, the doorway and its Potemkin house remain unmarked and undisclosed; it is the NYPD as Julien Berthier. (Which, in turn, reminds me of the Rentable Basement Maze).

But, of course, these sorts of "fake" spaces are not uncommon at all. There are also "dummy houses" in London—specifically at 23-24 Leinster Gardens—that were constructed from the very beginning as nothing but façades. They don't even have interiors; they are simply vents for the Underground, disguised as faux-Georgian flats. Check out some cool photos of them over at Urban 75.

This further brings to mind, however, a scene from Umberto Eco's underappreciated novel Foucault's Pendulum, where the narrator, being regaled with tales of subterranean Paris, is told that, "People walk by and they don't know the truth... That the house is a fake. It's a façade, an enclosure with no room, no interior. It is really a chimney, a ventilation flue that serves to release the vapors of the regional Métro. And once you know this you feel you are standing at the mouth of the underworld..."

Fake buildings and fake doors with secret interiors—or interiors that don't even exist. Purloined interiority.

Might I suggest, then, in light of these examples, that if someone, someday, were to approach Berthier's Door—after all, it deserves a name, capitalized and cartographically handed down friend-to-friend in a countergeography of the city—and finds themselves able to open it, to step through into a labyrinth of staircases and rooms stacked one on top the other leading down dozens of meters, and they are then able to explain later, after emerging somewhere perhaps near Dijon, what marvels of literally suburban cross-connection exist back there in a knitted fabric of minor spaces no one else has ever seen, that art, architecture, and mythology will finally have experienced their rightful co-identification.

[Image: Berthier's Door—near 1 Rue Chapon—visible on Google Street View].

Or, perhaps, if someone installs a door of their own—atop a hill in the 19th arrondissement, or down on a side-street near the Musée des arts et métiers, site of the now-irreparably damaged Foucault's Pendulum, or over in Moscow somewhere with its rumored secret subway—a maze of connective spaces will open up between them—indeed, wherever you install a door, in any city, if you simply wait long enough, the invisible network of tunnels burrowing away in the background of urban awareness will eventually come to find it.