An Aquarium in Paris
Sinking down the basement steps of the Palais Porte Dorée in Paris is to find it much as it was in its inaugural year. The hulking Art Deco palace was a centerpiece of the 1931 Colonial Exposition—a World’s Fair-type undertaking meant to reinvest French citizens of the interwar period in the “civilizing mission” of their brutal land-people-and-resources grab across Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Asia, and Pacifica.