Art Of The Day Weekly

Montparnasse, the endless tower

PARIS – The old neighborhood of Montparnasse was known for its bohemian life, for its artist studios, and – among other things - for the bars where Hemingway boxed with Scott Fitzgerald. Well, back in the beginning of the 1970s it went through a real shock when the highest tower within Paris proper was to be built. To fit in this 210 mts. tall building, the neighborhood was cleaned out. According to its opponents who had protested uselessly, the tower shared a quality with the Eiffel Tower, that of not seeing its metal structure when you are in it. Fifty years after it was built it has become a banal point of reference, and its terrace on the 56th floor offers the best view of the city. But time has left its marks and the tower now needs a renovation. The architectural contest for its beauty treatment, launched in June 2016, attracted no less than 700 offices, among them the icons of urban thinking such as OMA and Architecture Studio. On 19 September 2017, a little-known office has just been announced as the winner. Nouvelle AMO includes forty-year olds Franklin Azzi, Fréderic Chartier, Pascale Dalix, Mathurin Hardel and Cyrille Le Bihan. The project covers 40,000 m2 of façades with 7200 windows, and a 120,000 m2 internal area. The winners imagined a vegetable transformation, something that is very trendy. This “bioclimatic metamorphosis” as they call it, can best be seen from the first floors, and the top floor which will don a sort of glass and wood capsule. They promise to give the public a transparent tower that will be permanently alive with new “innovating” uses, still to be specified. The works, at a cost estimated at €300 million, should be over in time for the 2024 Olympic Games. Only then will we know whether this latest transformation will definitely reconcile the Parisians with the building they love the least.
• The exhibition Métamorphose de la tour Montparnasse at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, from 20 September to 20 October 2017, shows the architectural projets.

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