“To know Paris is to know a great deal” – Henry Miller.
Mythical, popular, trendy, romantic, Paris has many facets, which anyone can discover by wandering across its streets. Once you have reached the City of Lights, you are free to choose which side of it you want to explore. Paris is a city full of surprises. Be advised, it would take a very long time to visit this city in its entirety. As we said in our previous article, Paris and PcVue Solutions have a long relationship, with many buildings and monuments in the city supervised with a solution having PcVue at its core. To celebrate this connection between SCADA and the most beautiful city of the world, we offer you the following article; the first PcVue guided tour of Paris. It will provide you a new way to visit it, discovering Paris wonders while browsing some of PcVue’s most prestigious references.
Paris’ name has a connection with culture and art going back centuries. If you wander in the ninth district of the city, you’ll have the opportunity to visit the Garnier Opera. This building, a marvel of classical architecture, was built from 1861 to 1875 on the Boulevard des Capucines. This predates the Bastille Opera, the current home of the Parisian Opera. Today, Garnier Opera hosts the Parisian Ballet, providing a marvelous anachronistic frame to 1 900 admirers of classical dance. Behind the curtain, pun intended, PcVue ensures the Building Management System of both Operas, Garnier and Bastille, in a combined project involving 4 PcVue redundant Servers, 1 WebVue access and an Alert Software, communicating via BACnet to Schneider PLC’s.
For those who have an appetite for “more living” culture, the ninth district is also home to the renowned La Fayette Haussmann Galleries, where fashion and glamour dwell in the center of Paris. This 70,000m2 mall was built in 1893. It is a “must see” stop on a visit to Paris and welcomes more than 100,000 fashion enthusiasts each day.. Come and visit this fashion temple, wander across the alleys of the greatest designers, and be aware that the entire building management system of the mall is managed by a PcVue Solutions.
To continue your visit, head south down to the seventh district of Paris. Here can be found the Palais Bourbon, the house of the French Parliament. This building built in 1728 by the daughter of Louis XV, King of France, became the House of the National Assembly in 1798 and was definitely acquired by the French State in 1827. Today 577 national delegates sit behind those walls, constituting the first legislative power of the French Republic. Their votes are securely counted thanks to a SCADA solution, based on a PcVue redundant server, which also provides the Building Management System.
The next step of your tour, PcVue Solutions brings you in the heart of Paris, the first district. Here lies the “Comédie-Française”, one of the few state theatres in France and considered the oldest still-active theatre in the world, which opened in 1680. It inherited the name of the troupe of its best-known playwright, Molière, patron of French theater, who died under the rule of Louis XIV. The Salle Richelieu still welcomes visitors and theater lovers and its Building Management System is built on PcVue, with an architecture of 2 PcVue stations communicating via LonWorks.
We continue now in the same theme and historical period, i.e. when the Sun King, Louis XIV, was ruling. We bring you twenty minutes west from the capital, to the city of Versailles. Here lies the famous Palace of Versailles and its gardens, seat of the French monarchy from 1682 to 1789 (and the French Revolution). The will of the Sun King resulted in a 402 m long castle, encompassing 67 000 m² and 700 rooms, and in 800 hectares of gardens. The gardens, designed by André le Notre, are perfect examples of the classic French Garden style and are marvelous remnants of an ostentatious era. The Palace attracts more than 4 million visitors each year, while 6 million visit the gardens, seduced by the opportunity to walk among the pomp of the French XVIIth century. The Palace and PcVue Solutions are strongly related, for PcVue was chosen to ensure both the supervision of the aquatic domain and of the security system of the Palace. PcVue monitors the 30 km of pipes (295 000 cube meters of water) with 2 PcVue Stations communicating via ModBus over Ethernet.
To end this tour, we bring you at the western border of Paris, in the city of Neuilly. Here lies the “Jardin d’Acclimatation”, a little amusement park where you will find the Louis Vuitton Foundation. This building, built by the architect Frank Gehry, houses many art exhibitions and is aiming to become a major cultural center in the French Capital. This 127 million euros building is monitored by PcVue, which provides the management of air-conditioning, electricity, lighting and elevators systems. 4 PcVue Clients and 4 PcVue redundant Servers, as well as 25 WebVue Clients are installed on-site.
Your PcVue guided tour ends here, in this garden, as you can see, PcVue and the City of Light share a common history. We hope that you have enjoyed your visit, discovering Paris under a brand new perspective. From there, if you look up, you can see the Eiffel Tower, the next and last step of your journey in the French capital, which we will visit in our following article.
Created on: 28 Aug 2017
