That’s right! I’m getting a facelift. Parisians will be sorry
Renzo Piano is turning his hand to Paris's tallest building. Spare a thought for the Tour Montparnasse's struggles.
It’s brutal when you can’t even call yourself brutalist. Here I stand, the towering butt of a joke so laboured that it scarcely bears repeating: The best that can be said about the Tour Montparnasse? “From ze top iz ze only place in Paris where she cannot be seen.” Very drôle, I’m sure, but with a sad ring of truth.
Take a ride up any other mid-height skyscrapers you care to name and I daresay that you’ll see yourself looking back in the glassy reflection of neighbouring windows. I can’t say the same: at 210 metres tall I stand head, shoulders and knees above my surrounding colleagues. Any notion that I might have initiated a skyward surge, modernising Paris in a pivot to Manhattan-en-Seine, was dashed by my very construction: just two years after I was completed the city issued a moratorium on buildings of more than seven storeys.
Yes, hopes were high – 59 floors, not to put too fine a point on it – when ground was broken in 1969. A new direction for the city, artists’ ateliers demolished to make room for me, a shopping centre and this emerging and sublimely American form of creative expression: consumerism. Not a popular idea, it turned out.
Completed in 1973 to almost-universal derision, I could only stand and stare as they finished my rive droite counterpart, the Centre Pompidou, in 1977. Parisians hated it too, until they didn’t: scepticism gave way to pride. It’s hard to carry a grudge. Who could fail to be cheered by its playful accent of colour, its formal experimentation and wilful otherness against the beige, Lutetian limestone totality of Paris? From ground level the city is magnifique, I’m told, but I defy anyone to stare at all of it, every day, without thinking dark thoughts about municipal obstinacy.
Of course, Parisians have never rushed to embrace novelty. Even the Tour Eiffel, my nemesis, had its critics. And yet today it’s everything I’m not: world-famous, universally adored and taller. Envy? Who said anything about envy? There was something a bit Sadean, perhaps, on the part of my developers to put me quite so en face with my arch-enemy. But size isn’t everything, you know, and from where I’m standing, postmodernist vim wins out over steampunk clockwork any day. What a wind up.
Worst of all, just beyond La dame de fer is the proud and glittering range of my would-be peers. The stink after my construction banished skyscrapers to the La Défense neighbourhood, outside the city limits and beyond the range of opprobrium. Too late for me – I’m stuck, rooted in a derelict shopping centre. The stink has changed but it hasn’t gone away. You can almost smell the pee from up here.
As I say – brutal. But things are looking up. At the end of this month I’ll be closed for a four-year redevelopment project. Lipstick on a cochon? How dare you. While the 15th arrondissement’s mayor, Philippe Goujon, has stated his preference for my demolition, he has agreed not to “let the best be the enemy of the good”. From murky brown, I’ll be transformed to iridescent: clear glass, garden roof, the works.
And best of all? Renzo Piano is also involved in my renovation. C’est vrai, the starchitect who, alongside Richard Rogers, gave Paris what it didn’t know it needed in the form of my beloved Centre Pompidou, is turning his hand towards yours truly. “You always have to catch the spirit of the moment,” he told The New York Times. In our nipped and tucked age, perhaps he’ll succeed where my last developers failed.
Times have changed and the emergent consumer-focused instincts of the late-1960s don’t feel quite so déclassé anymore. Consumerism is the air we breathe and when my new cafés, shops and green space are installed they’ll come running. After they’ve popped up the Eiffel for a good look, that is.
Tour Montparnasse is a building in the 15th arrondissement. Its opinion on the proposed architectural upheaval was written by Paris-based journalist Augustin Macellari.
