Business
& Labor
Upgrade Announced for La Défense
(archrecord.construction.com - 11/09/2006)
By Robert
Such
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click image to view larger
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| Image courtesy of
EPAD |
In July, the French government announced
major long-term redevelopment plans for the suburban Paris
business district La Défense in order to shore up aging
buildings and to make the zone more competitive internationally.
Built over a looped network of roads
at the end of Paris’s historic axis, the urban design
of the 160-hectare La Défense was inspired by Le Corbusier’s
concept of towers in a park. The project, named for the Franco-Prussian
War monument La Défense de Paris, began in the 1950s
alongside postwar economic recovery: Houses, small factories,
and farms were first demolished to make way for the Center
of New Industries and Technologies (CNIT), the 1958 exhibition
hall built by the Federation of Engineering Industries to
show off French industrial achievements; the Etablissement
Public pour l'Aménagement de La Défense (EPAD)
was founded the same year to purchase land for the future
district.
Although built in phases afterward,
the overall urban design of La Défense has “changed
little” says Bernard Bled, director of EPAD, the public
authority that manages La Défense. “It is necessary
to make it better, more daring, more modern,” he says.
“We must rethink La Défense’s
urban design,” says Transport Minister Dominique Perben,
“and look at what’s happening elsewhere with La
Défense’s competitors, London’s Docklands,
Barcelona, Amsterdam, Milan, Madrid, and Frankfurt—the
creativity, the energy, the boldness.”
Even in its infancy, commentators criticized
La Défense for failing to engage the street or to mix
uses. The newspaper Le Figaro reported, “The walkways
at midday are about as quiet as a Sunday afternoon in the
country, and at night you could think there’s a curfew.”
The CNIT, however, was celebrated for its thin-concrete, 153-foot
roof span.
One in six La Défense buildings
was built before 1985 and has not been refurbished since.
Work will begin with the partial demolition and modernization
of 17 high-rise buildings, and includes Kohn Pedersen Fox’s
redesign of Axa Tower, which, reconstructed to a height of
738 feet, will become the tallest building in France. Other
projects include the refurbishment of the Quatre Temps shopping
complex as well as the overhaul of the interior of CNIT.
Along the front of the CNIT’s semicircular
glass façade, four terraces will be sunk into the pedestrian-only
parvis, or esplanade, which runs up the spine of La Défense.
Crossed by footbridges, the sunken, planted terraces are designed
to reveal the full height of the building, whose base was
concealed by the construction of the parvis.
New skyscraper construction is due to
start in 2007. That effort will create at least 3.2 million
square feet of floor space over a five-year period. And 1,400
apartments are due to be completed by 2013, followed by the
extension of a fast-transit train line to improve links between
the capital, La Défense, and the surrounding region.
The project will be financed by the sale of building permits.
EPAD also announced that it will launch
an international architecture competition this year. The winning
architectural firm will construct an iconic building, the
Tour Signal, which will symbolize the urban renewal of the
district.
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