Towering Ambition

Large-scale development is set to make Paris’s La Défense business district more tempting for living and working

- Jenny Southan

I’m not a fan of heights, but every now and then it’s important to get yourself into a glass elevator and see the views. Looming 360 feet high, La Grande Arche is La Défense’s most familiar landmark; a monolithic open-sided cube, with an 120,000-square-foot, newly renovated roof that allows you to gaze all the way down Avenue Charles de Gaulle to the Arc du Triomphe on the other side of the River Seine.

Construction of this two-square-mile cluster of high-rise towers began in 1958, with the intention of replacing farmland and dilapidated suburbs with a hub for business and banking. The first building erected was the low but expansive Center of New Industries and Technologies (now a convention center and Hilton hotel at the foot of the Arche), followed by the first of France’s office blocks – the Esso Tower and the Nobel Tower – in the sixties.

Today, La Défense is the largest purpose-built district in Europe, hovering above a network of roads on a 75-acre elevated concrete platform called “the Slab,” which allows pedestrians to walk freely across enormous plazas while cars pass beneath. For decades, the area has been home to a forest of mono-functional structures, occupied nine-to-five by workers who ebb and flow from their jobs to their outlying homes.

However, Paris has realized that it is falling behind other cities with its lifestyle-less urban planning, so city leaders have embarked on turning La Défense into a place not only for work but for living and socializing, too. Central to this is a host of ambitious projects that will set new records for scale; and in so doing rob London’s Shard of the title “tallest building in the EU.”

Design for Life