Intimate spaces are hidden behind uniform facades.
Their uniform facades represent the rationally ordered Paris of Baron Haussmann, who carved out the city's broad boulevards.
The same logic of urban renewal played out elsewhere in the city: Haussmann sought to check nearly a millennium of largely unplanned growth with the imposition of rectilinear street patterns and broad boulevards lined by apartment buildings with uniform facades and uniform height.
The uniform, chocolate stone facades got the most criticism, but the peculiar high stoop was also derided -- it allowed a separate service entrance at grade for the servants but required the owners to walk up a flight of stairs to get inside.
"The architectural quality of the rear facades, their uniform line, with no extensions allowed -- he felt it materially added to the value of the properties.
The lobby entries of the IAC headquarters are discreetly located on the two side streets, giving the building's main facade a smooth, uniform appearance.
The fair's new buildings had impressive Classical facades with a uniform cornice height of 60 feet (18.25 metres).
His military bearing, forthright manner and professions of patriotism won many admirers, but to his detractors he was an arrogant lawbreaker seeking refuge behind a patriotic facade and a Marine uniform.
The covenants also limited rear additions, required uniform paint colors and regulated the facades.
"How easy it would be to become eccentric," another character muses, "to just give up the facade of normalcy and its uniforms, to let yourself go, go wild, to swing out farther and farther away from the center".
There's the antiquated uniforms worn by the service staff; the front facade of their earlier neoclassical offices is held up like a severed head.
