The ugliest and most hated building in Paris is its only skyscraper. Since they cannot demolish it, they have come up with another solution: make it invisible.

For more than half a century, the Paris skyline has remained practically frozen. You may not have realized it, but in the historic center practically no building can exceed seven floors. This norm was born after a controversial construction of the seventies that provoked such public rejection that it changed forever the urban rules of the city. Today, that architectural experiment is once again at the center of the debate.

And they have found a solution.

The tower that should never have existed. In a city famous for its uniform horizon of six or seven-story stone buildings, the dark silhouette of the Montparnasse Tower It has been breaking the visual harmony of Paris for more than 50 years. Inaugurated in 1973 with 59 plants and nearly 210 meters high, the mass was born as a symbol of progress in a capital that was trying to modernize after the post-war period and transform the deteriorated Montparnasse neighborhood into a business district.

The project had the political support of President Georges Pompidou and the Minister of Culture André Malraux, and had to demonstrate that the city could hug “the modernity of electricity”, fast trains and telecommunications. However, the result was an enormous monolith of dark brown steel and glass that stood out brutally above the urban fabric of the 19th century, almost immediately becoming the building most hated in the capital.

Aging too quickly. As usually happens in hyperbolic projects that do not end well, the problem started even before that the tower was finished. The plan had been conceived in the fifties, but could not be started until the end of the sixties due to lack of technology, money and experience to build a skyscraper of those dimensions in Europe.

When it was finally built, its late modernist aesthetic already seemed dated, and its dark color (compared by some critics to a nicotine stain) contrasted violently with classical Parisian architecture. It almost instantly became a crooked line of the capital.

The black sheep. The public reaction was so negative that just four years after its inauguration, the City Council prohibited building buildings of more than seven floors in the city center, pushing out the skyscrapers towards the business district of La Défense.

Since then, the tower has remained an urban anomaly or, if you will, a reminder to avoid: the only skyscraper in historic Paris.

The most repudiated building in the most photographed city. Over the decades, many controversial buildings in Paris ended up being accepted and even lovedfrom the Eiffel Tower itself to the Louvre pyramid or the Pompidou Center. The Montparnasse Tower, on the other hand, never achieved reconcile with the Parisians. Jokes about its presence became part of popular culture: many say that the best view of Paris is from your viewpoint because it is the only place from which the tower cannot be seen. Others describe it as the box in which the Eiffel Tower arrived packaged.

Even local politicians have called the building of “urban catastrophe”and for years proposals arose to tear it down completely. However, despite widespread rejection, the skyscraper has also maintained a curious cultural life. For example, the famous “French Spiderman” Alain Robert climbed the towerand has also appeared in movies and continues to attract tourists who climb to its observation platform to contemplate the city.

An impossible demolition. You may be thinking about it. If Paris hates its own creation, why the hell hasn’t it been knocked down? As tempting as the idea of ​​removing the tower from the Paris skyline is for many, tearing it down was never an option. a realistic option. The reason? The building still houses offices, has a huge commercial infrastructure at its base and its demolition would involve a gigantic cost in addition to enormous logistical and environmental problems.

Even those who would like to see it disappear acknowledge that it would be financially unviable. The tower is too big, too complex and too integrated into the neighborhood to simply erase it from the map. This reality forced the city and the promoters to look for an alternative solution: If the most hated skyscraper in Paris could not be destroyed, we would have to try to transform it.

EITHER directly delete it.

The solution: make it disappear. From this paradox was born one of the most ambitious urban renewal projects in the city. Because the strategy is not to demolish the Montparnasse Tower, but to radically alter your appearance so that, in essence, it is not “seen” and stops dominating the Parisian horizon.

The plan, promoted by a consortium of French architects and accompanied by the remodeling of the surroundings designed by Renzo Pianoaims to replace the dark façade with a kind transparent crystal leather crossed by garden terraces, balconies and vertical gardens that visually fragment the volume of the building. The idea is quite clear: lighten its presence to the point that the gigantic brown block stop imposing yourself about him skyline.

A “trick” worth 700 million. The transformation of the tower and the entire urban complex that surrounds it will exceed 700 million of euros and aims to convert a degraded environment (marked by an almost abandoned shopping center and an unwelcoming concrete platform) into an open space with squares, pedestrian walkways, green areas and new connections with the neighborhood.

In this way, the tower will retain its structure original plan to reduce carbon emissions during construction, will incorporate more efficient energy technologies and add high-rise gardens and a rooftop greenhouse. The project has been caught for years between political debates, neighborhood concerns and architectural discussions, but the closure of the building to evict the tenants now opens the door to start of works.

The strange fate of the Montparnasse mass. In short, more than fifty years after that giddy inauguration, the Montparnasse Tower is still being an anomaly repudiated in the city that banned skyscrapers after their construction. Paradoxically, that same singularity has also turned it into a species of unintentional icon from Paris: because it appears in Lego setsin films and in tourist guides, while thousands of visitors continue to climb to its viewpoint.

If you like, his fate also reflects one of the permanent tensions in the French capital. between conservation and modernity. For decades it was the symbol of a gross urban planning error. Now Paris is trying to turn that same “failure” into something else: a skyscraper that, without completely disappearing, stop imposing yourself about the city that for half a century has tried to ignore him.

Image | Andrey BobrovskyASaber91, victortsuSteven Strehl, PXHere

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