A tour de force for Paris
19/05/2007
Dominic Bradbury reports on plans for a sensuous new skyscraper
Paris has always been nervous of skyscrapers. The Tour Montparnasse (210m high and still the tallest office block in France) didn't help matters when it was built in the early 1970s. Largely despised, it only made the city even more protective of its unique, ordered, low-slung charm. Even the Eiffel Tower (324m) was famously controversial when it first appeared at the end of the 19th century, although today Parisians seem anxious to retain its largely unrivalled presence on the city's skyline.
But now, on the outskirts of Paris, a new bloom of skyscraper is underway at La Défense, Paris's business district, officially in the separate commune of Puteaux and already home to a few rather bland high-rise developments.
Chief among the new flush of 21st-century towers will be La Phare, or "lighthouse", the most ambitious project to date from Pritzker Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne and his California-based practice, Morphosis.
It's a big deal for Parisians, who will be able to see the 300m tower from all across the city, and also for France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy. Until last December, Sarkozy was head of EPAD, the body in charge of development in La Défense, which wants the district to shake itself up to compete with Canary Wharf in London. La Phare, commissioned by property developer Unibail to house 10,000 office workers, is due for completion in 2012, just before London celebrates the Olympics.
"It was clear from the get-go that it would be something with a real presence," says Mayne, who won the contract over fierce competition from Herzog & de Meuron, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas. "The competition was about designing a monument or a symbol - after all, it will be the tallest building in Paris, apart from the Eiffel Tower."
Coming from Morphosis, the gentle, sensuous form of the double-skinned tower - a more complicated cousin of Norman Foster's phallic London Gherkin - is a revelation. Founded in 1972, Morphosis established itself as an experimental, radical practice with an emphasis on straight lines and razor-sharp edges, the kind of thing you can see in their brutally jagged Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, California. But La Phare is an altogether softer idea: its undulating surface layers have been compared to the tailored folds of a fashionable dress sheathing a hard body beneath.
"A friend joked recently, 'Thom, you've discovered sex.' But I don't start with a look, it's something that develops organically," says Mayne. "It's like looking at my children. I had some ideas when they were babies but just couldn't anticipate how they would grow up. I guess this sensuousness in the Phare is partly to do with French and Parisian culture - that must have entered my brain at some point. But I also wanted a softness that responded to the immense scale of the project and the complex nature of the site."
Complex it most certainly is. The site is not only close to Johann Otto van Sprecklesen's Grande Arche of 1990, but there is also a cluster of smaller buildings around the base of the building, plus highways and railways passing under the site.
A vast cube needs to be carved out of the base of the tower for pedestrian access, so the main lobby will be placed on the 10th floor and reached by tube-like escalators pushing into the building. There will be a public restaurant and viewing deck up at the top of the 68-storey tower, plus a small forest of wind turbines.
"It's a perfect Morphosis site," says 63-year old Mayne, "because our best work comes out of more complicated situations. I work off problems like this, much more so than with a bare bean-field site. There were so many forces affecting the design where form and performance get integrated into a single idea. It's almost a non-site. If you were to look for it, you wouldn't find it - you'd scratch your head."
La Phare, then, has a lot on its plate. It has to be a landmark; it has to tie many sprawling elements of La Défense together in a cohesive whole; it has to be a symbol of progress; and it has to work as a fully functional office block.
As with Morphosis's new San Francisco Federal Building, where air-conditioning has been largely omitted in favour of natural ventilation techniques and sun screens, La Phare also reflects Mayne's passion for sustainability. The "Eraserhead hair" of turbines on top of the tower will generate power to ventilate the building, while the double skin will minimise heat absorption.
Mayne is one of a number of US architects currently making their mark in France, including the formidable Frank Gehry, who is designing the Louis Vuitton Centre for Creation in the Bois de Boulogne on the outskirts of Paris. But, if Mayne can realise his ambitious plan, La Phare will tower over them all.
www.morphosis.net
