The Sky's The Limit

Whatever Ernest Hemingway may have written, Paris is in fact an immovable feast — at least when it comes to the height of its buildings. The city still proudly retains its 19th century skyline, from the Arc de Triomphe and Sacré Coeur to that most universally recognized of structures, the Eiffel Tower. Central Paris has no high-rises and most of the residential neighborhoods mirror the human scale of the Seine, which lacks the brawn of the Thames or the Rhine. This is no accident. The French capital is still largely drawn along the imperial lines laid down by Parisian prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who had very clear ideas of just what a Parisian building ought to look like.

Now that classic picture is being challenged by Haussmann's 21st century successor, Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoë. He believes that Paris, one of the most densely populated major cities in Europe, just might need skyscrapers. In recent months he has deliberately kindled a debate about lifting rules in place since the 1970s that limit the height of new buildings to 37 m — and as little as 18 m in some central neighborhoods. The restrictions rankle a mayor keen to nudge Paris into modernity. "Under current laws, if Frank Gehry wanted to build his Guggenheim Museum here in Paris instead of Bilbao, he wouldn't be allowed," Delanoë said at a recent public meeting in a gymnasium on the northern reaches of Paris. "Do we want a city that's immobile, conservative, one that excludes hundreds of thousands of people? That's not my model!" That's not Gehry's model either. "Paris is a magnificent 19th century city," Gehry told TIME, "but you need interventions if a city is to stay alive."

	Under current laws, if Frank Gehry wanted to build his Guggenheim here in Paris instead of Bilbao, he wouldn't be allowed — BERTRAND DELANOE, mayor of Paris

Delanoë aims to pack a lot into the 105 sq km of Paris proper. He campaigned in 2001 on a promise to provide an additional 3,500 social-housing units a year. He wants more jobs in Paris, where the unemployment rate is over 10%. He wants more bike trails, more green space, more child-care facilities. If in the process he can get a signature building or two — a Gehry, or a Norman Foster like London's Swiss Re tower — so much the better. But it won't happen soon. "Now we're taking care of the garden, preparing the earth," says Dominique Alba, director general of Le Pavillon de l'Arsenal, the city's architectural center, and a close adviser to Delanoë. "Later we can do the gastronomy."

Some people don't like the menu. No surprise there: Parisians have always been ferociously protective of their skyline. In 1887, writers Alexandre Dumas fils and Guy de Maupassant were among the artists to protest the construction of "a gigantic black factory chimney" now known as the Eiffel Tower. After losing that battle, Maupassant favored the restaurant at the base — it was the only place where the tower didn't mar his view.

Parisians eventually grew to love that monument, but they've never accepted many of the tall buildings that went up in the 1970s. Even after 30 years, the tower of Maine-Montparnasse, a 209-m monstrosity jutting out of a decrepit esplanade atop the Montparnasse train station on the Left Bank, has few friends. And in the 19th arrondissement, a working-class district in the east of the city, a forest of high-rise apartment blocks has made a cruel joke of the Place des Fêtes, a "festival square" where an infernal wind whips across an artless expanse of concrete. More of that? No thanks, say many Parisians. "Do we really have to leap into an infantile contest of verticality with other world cities to see who has the most beautiful and biggest?" asks Jean-François Blet, a Green member of the city council. "The tower is the symbol of the international banalization of the urban landscape, liberal globalization applied to architecture."