Plan Aims to Enliven Paris’s Financial District, Long Called Soulless
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Version 0 of 1. PARIS — On Bastille Day 1989, when President François Mitterrand inaugurated the Grande Arche, a 40-story postmodern bookend about three miles to the west of the Arc de Triomphe, it seemed its own form of triumph. The ceremony celebrated a decade-long building boom at La Défense, the sprawling array of office buildings long envisioned as Paris’s answer to Lower Manhattan or the City of London. But La Défense, begun during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle in the late 1950s and built just west of Paris by bulldozing slums and paving over farmland, has always worked better in architectural theory than in anthropological practice. Rather than the Parisian business hub its founders described, it often seems more like the isolated end of a spoke that has highlighted a crucial flaw in urban planning — a concern with making architectural statements — rather than an affinity for the people in and around the buildings. When non-French planning experts assess La Défense, they say it shares the same problems as the Canary Wharf complex in London, where developers have tried to supplant the City with Big Architecture and whose artificial origins may be hard to overcome. The experts look more favorably on the somewhat organic mix of business and residential of Lower Manhattan, which has evolved over the last century. “La Défense has always suffered from a creative hypothermia,” said Wojciech Czaja, an Austrian architecture critic. “It is a sad area because it is atmospherically and emotionally perceived as a business district only.” The public agency that manages the complex has hired an architectural firm to draft a new master plan in hopes of making the grandiose vision for La Défense a livable reality. It is difficult to determine whether the plan can withstand the headwinds of Europe’s continuing financial woes, and France’s lingering recession and an unemployment rate near 11 percent. But it would be wrong to call La Défense a business failure, because it is home to 1,500 head offices, including those of 15 of the world’s 50 largest companies. French corporations with their signature headquarters here include the oil and gas giant Total, the big bank Société Générale and Areva, a leading builder of nuclear power plants. And developers continue to build. Critics have long derided the mixed commercial, residential and retailing complex, which covers 1.6 square kilometers, or 0.62 square miles, as dehumanizing. While about 20,000 mainly low- and middle-income people live here, the vast central plaza can feel like a ghost town after 5 p.m. and on weekends, once most of the district’s 150,000 office workers have left by train, bus or subway to more desirable parts of Paris or its less surreal suburbs. “There is nothing good about living here,” said Carlin Pierre, 54, who works at a waste disposal center in the district and resides in one of the Brutalist communal, rent-subsidized housing blocks tucked amid the high-rise office buildings. “Sure, it’s a nice area to come as a tourist, or even to work,” Mr. Pierre said, “but it’s terrible to live in La Défense.” Alessandra Cianchetta, a partner at AWP, the firm mapping the master plan, acknowledges the enormousness of her task. “La Défense as a concept is a bit obsolete,” Ms. Cianchetta said. “There is no interaction, no hospitality here.” Vacancy rates at La Défense, long an up-and-down indicator of the French economy, are once more on the rise. Next to the Grande Arche is the site of what was to be a 71-story office tower, Tour Signal, commissioned with much fanfare in 2008 to the French architect Jean Nouvel. It has been canceled. Still, three new, architecturally ambitious office towers are under construction at La Défense. And the recently financed Hermitage Plaza project on the Seine River at the easternmost edge of La Défense, if it opens as planned in 2018, will include Europe’s tallest residential building. Some of the continued activity, of course, has to do with the long lag between conceiving a commercial real estate project and getting it built — a speculative roll of the dice that has paid little heed to shorter-term considerations like France and Europe’s current economic travails. “La Défense’s ambitions to create a new kind of urbanism have been disappointing,” said Robert A. M. Stern, the dean of the Yale School of Architecture and principal of his namesake firm. Because “the residential areas are too isolated in their own zones,” Mr. Stern said, it is rare to spot locals buying groceries in one of the complex’s shopping malls or to see families with strollers on the weekends. A confined office area can work in some big American cities, but mostly because they are connected to the surrounding neighborhoods. Lower Manhattan “has residential areas right at its edge with streets threaded through to the city itself,” Mr. Stern said. Despite these misgivings, Mr. Stern’s firm was willing to take the commission to design Tour Carpe Diem, a tower under construction in a dense cluster of high-rises on the northern edge of the district. “Carpe Diem is not just another aloof, objectlike office building sitting on a podium,” Mr. Stern said. “It is a dual-oriented piece of connective tissue linking the center of La Defénse with the peripheral roads of Courbevoie,” a middle-class municipality. In any case, there are no tenants yet signed for Carpe Diem, which is to be completed in September. A defining feature of La Défense is the plaza, a pedestrian slab of some 30 hectares, or 74 acres, that acts as a roof to underground shops, a bus terminal and a hangarlike train and subway depot with none of the charm of most Paris train stations. Those who pass through each day, but live elsewhere, often make their peace with La Défense. The master plan of AWP calls for a complete makeover of the transportation center, adding entertainment sites to the public plaza and building footbridges to connect the now largely isolated slab with the surrounding neighborhoods. There are new business districts on the competitive metropolitan Paris office market that real estate agents say are luring companies with lower prices — for example, areas in the north along the Seine and in the so-called inner rim of Paris, which includes the district of Saint-Denis, home of France’s national stadium, the Stade de France. Société Générale, which has 20,000 employees at its La Défense headquarters, plans to transfer several thousand people to the eastern Paris suburb Fontenay-sous-Bois, where it is building a new business campus. “A lot of the towers in La Défense are going to empty out as companies look to rationalize their usage of office space,” said Alexis Motte, chief executive of Mobilitis, a real estate advisory agency. “The market in La Défense is clearly oversupplied.” The vacancy rate in La Défense stands at 7.5 percent, compared with 3.3 percent in the second quarter of 2008. The Tour Eqho, a semicylindrical glass tower that formerly housed the French headquarters of I.B.M., is undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation by its developer, Icade. But so far, Icade is struggling to find enough tenants for its reopening later this year, people involved in the market say. Icade declined to comment. But some developers evidently think eventual success is simply a matter of timing. Consider Hermitage Plaza, a project featuring a pair of towers planned for the western bank of the Seine and designed by the British architect Norman Foster. “The idea is to create a Manhattan in the French style in La Défense,” said Emin Iskenderov, a Russian developer who secured a loan this year from Sberbank, which is based in Moscow, to build the towers. The complex will be only a short walk from one of La Défense’s two subway stations. And it is near the Pont de Neuilly, a bridge that pedestrians can cross the river to reach the upscale Paris suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. It might feel more like part of Paris, in other words, than most of the rest of La Defénse does. “La Défense,” said Ms. Cianchetta, the master planner, “is like an iceberg that is disconnected from the areas around it.” <NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>Catherine Chapman contributed reporting. |