The Sky's The Limit

The memory of so many bad buildings has made a lot of Parisians almost pathologically opposed to more. "The very idea of building in Paris is seen as wrong and condemnable," sighs Paris architect Bernard Reichen. After the Tour Montparnasse went up, mayor Jacques Chirac and his conservative successor Jean Tiberi figured they had rightly read the public will by keeping a strict limit on building heights.

As Blet and other opponents of towers point out, the height restrictions haven't cut Paris off entirely from architectural innovation: consider Jean Nouvel's glass-walled Institut du Monde Arabe (1988) along the Seine and I.M. Pei's pyramid at the Louvre (1989). "Nothing is stopping them from making nice things," insists Fabrice Piault, head of an activist neighborhood organization in the 13th arrondissement, where office buildings are filling in the space around the four 79-m towers of the François Mitterrand Library (1995) — a prestige project for which height restrictions didn't apply.

There's a certain degree of irony in the fact that the proposal to raise the roofs of Paris comes not from greedy developers, but from the first leftist mayor Paris has had since the commune of 1871. A Socialist but no ideologue, Delanoë has appealed to the so-called Bobo set — the "bourgeois bohemians" — by promoting bicycles and buses, installing a sandy beach along the Seine in the summer and promising a more approachable and responsible city administration. He has become one of France's most popular Socialist office holders, and controls both the city and the local party with a self-confidence and ambition few predicted just a few years ago.

Delanoë argues that any change to the building code would be dictated by real need and executed with great care. He is motivated not by profits, but in part by the demand for housing: the waiting list for social housing in the city stands at 100,000 families and counting. But mayoral aides suggest that towers are more likely to serve as commercial office space or as housing developments that will attract the young middle class, who now have to go to the suburbs to find affordable places to live.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]In addition, Delanoë hopes that the easing of restrictions will give a boost to business in the city. Paris lost some 200,000 jobs over the 1990s, mostly to complexes around the periphery such as La Défense to the west. Recently, bank Crédit Foncier de France and insurance giants Aviva and Generali have moved operations — and jobs — from central Paris to the suburbs.

Big projects won't happen in the historic heart of Paris, but rather at the edges: the old industrial quarter along the Seine in the 13th is already under development, and other sites along railroad concentrations in the north and northeast of Paris would be prime candidates. Some architects have argued that well-planned high-rises can help reconnect Paris to its suburbs, now cut off by the belt highway around the city proper.

"Of course Parisians say they're against new tall buildings when the question is posed in the abstract," says Jean-Pierre Caffet, the deputy mayor for urban development. But he hopes that minds will change when specific, high-quality projects are presented in the months to come. There are signs they would. Françoise de Panafieu, the fiery mayor of the upscale 17th arrondissement and an unyielding Delanoë critic, says she's always thought that a nice big building in her neighborhood could enliven the grim ride from the airport into the city. "We're not going to take just any tower," says Panafieu. "We need one like a jewel." That's what everyone says, of course. But Paris, where tall buildings have too often been carbuncles, deserves nothing less.