ArcSpace has a photo show on La Phare.
ArcSpace Link for La Phare
ArcSpace is a serious architectural photography site and it doesn't want people copying its photos. After some discussion with them a few years ago, they gave me permission to post photos on a2k, but my copy of that is on my old computer; therefore, I prefer to just give the link. While you're at the site though, notice what a rich compilation of architectual photos it is.
Today's New York Times compares La Phare very favorably to a project planned in St. Petersburg, Gazprom.
NYT article about La Phare and Gazprom
Part of the article -
Towers Will Change the Look of Two World Cities
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: December 4, 2006
The current mania for flamboyant skyscrapers has been a mixed blessing for architecture. While it has yielded a stunning outburst of creativity, it has also created an atmosphere in which novelty is often prized over innovation. At times it's as if the architects were dog owners proudly parading their poodles in front of a frivolous audience.
This mad new world was much in evidence last week when planners announced the results of two major international competitions that included some of the world's brightest architectural luminaries. In each case, a tower design will significantly alter the skyline of one of the world's most beloved cities. But while the design for the Phare Tower in Paris is a work of sparkling originality that wrestles thoughtfully with the urban conflicts of the city's postwar years, the other, the gargantuan Gazprom City in St. Petersburg, Russia, is a bone-chilling expression of corporate ego run amok.
Together, they train a lens on the range of architectural approaches to a daunting problem: the clash between the classical city and the inflated scale of the new global economy. And they underscore the limits of the creative imagination when it is detached from historical memory.
Designed by Thom Mayne of the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis, the Phare Tower will rise amid the office towers of La Défense, the western business district conceived in the late 1950s as a way of expanding the city while protecting its historic core from overdevelopment. Embedded in this maze of generic towers and blank plazas, the tower will overlook the hollow cube of the 1989 Grande Arche and the elegantly arched concrete roof of the 1958 C.N.I.T. conference center.
Given the array of talent involved in this competition, the results overall were surprisingly tame. The lipstick form and vertical gardens of a tower proposed by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are virtually a cliché of contemporary architecture at this point. And while Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel made sincere efforts to address the nature of the site, both capped their towers with brutish geometric forms that feel strangely tacked on: in Mr. Koolhaas's case, with four blocks that cantilever out from near the top of the tower, and in Mr. Nouvel's with an upside down U-shaped mirrored form that suggests nothing so much as a gigantic magnet.
By comparison, Mr. Mayne dug deeper into the site's convoluted history to create a building of hypnotic power. Viewed from central Paris, the building's gauzy skin, draped tautly over the tower's undulating form, will have the look of luxurious fabric. But as you draw closer, the forms will appear more muscular, with massive crisscrossing steel beams supporting a perforated metal surface.
The aura of the veil has a titillating vibe, but there is nothing superficial about this design. By drawing on what energy the site has ?- a tangle of roadways and underground trains ?- the tower transcends La Défense's deadening urban reputation. Supported by a series of gargantuan steel legs evoking a tripod, the tower straddles the site, allowing pedestrian and train traffic to flow directly underneath. The skin lifts up to envelop a nearby plaza, linking it to an underground train station. Beneath this perforated metal skirt, gigantic escalators shoot up more than 100 feet to a lobby packed with restaurants and cafes.
The approach recalls the machine-age fascination with physical and social mobility that yielded masterpieces like the Gare de Lyon in Paris and Grand Central Terminal in New York. Pushing the idea further, Mr. Mayne rips the top off an existing plaza to reveal the trains and traffic passing underneath. As you ride up escalators linking the plaza to the lobby, seams open up in the building's skin to create vertiginous views of both an underground world of shadowy figures and the monuments of the beloved city past the Arc de Triomphe to the east.
The notion of building as machine is tempered by the structure's earnest environmental agenda. Double-layered skin on the south side of the building will deflect the harshest sunlight. On the north side, the surface peels apart to reveal transparent glass skin. The tower's peak, conceived as an extension of the skin, seemingly fraying apart in the breeze, consists of a cluster of antennas and a wind farm that will generate electric power.
By embracing a populist lineage that stretches back through the Pompidou Center's exoskeletal structure to the grand lobby of Charles Garnier's Paris Opera, Mr. Mayne extracts unexpected beauty from this psychologically isolated site. In so doing, he redeems a scorned area of the city while forging one of the most powerful works Paris has seen in a generation.
If the Phare Tower demonstrates architecture's potential as a civilizing tool, the design for the Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom matches Paris's catastrophic 1972 Montparnasse Tower in its disdain for the architectural legacy of a world city. (See link for rest of article and photos of the two towers.)
Link to another NYT article explaining more about the problems with the Gazprom project
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