Recladding Paris Monstrous Montparnasse Skyscraper Gets A New Lease On Life

Behold the Tour Montparnasse, 59-stories, 689-feet high, built in 1969-1973 during the presidency of Georges Pompidou (yes, he of the inglorious Pompidou Center across the River Seine). Note that there is nothing like it in the neighborhood. Curiously, the hidden hand behind its development belonged to American real estate poobah Wylie F. Tuttle, who enlisted a consortium of 17 French insurance companies and seven banks in the project to get Europe’s then-tallest skyscraper built. Minister of Culture, André Malraux at first opposed the idea, then folded under pressure and approved. a permit for the monstrosity. The joke goes that the view from the tower is the most beautiful in Paris because it’s the only spot from which the tower can’t be seen. It has also been called the box the 'Eiffel Tower came in.'

Now, more than a half century later, the thing is getting a bit worn. The surrounding shopping mall district, spanning about 22-acres, was hemorrhaging tenants and had become the campground haunt of homeless migrants. Something had to be done! Starchitect Renzo Piano was hired to rescue it — though there was plenty of sentiment to raze the goshdarn thing altogether.

The tower itself is getting a $700-million “skin-job” — the monkeyshit brown original cladding changed-out for shiny mirrored glass, with an underskirt of hanging gardens on the lower ten floors in a nod to the still ongoing “green” mania. The surrounding shopping mall — a typically American-style urban blunder — is due to be replaced by a network of “typical Parisian streets” fronted by shops in the normal manner.

Hence, the tower supposedly gets a new lease on life, reviled as it may be as a freak. But then here we are on the threshold of Artificial Intelligence cutting its awesome swathe through the office workplace. After 2021, the Great Covid-19 Op savaged office occupancy in Europe just as it did in America, with so many employees working-from-home. All that vacancy played hell with commercial real estate. A-I is looking like the coup de grâce for the office skyscraper now, threatening to eliminate vast categories of corporate employment per se. Let’s face it: Europe is not doing a stellar job of anticipating what the actual future might bring. Anyway, nice try. (Below: the tower before and after its fix-up.)

Below: a close-up rendering of the “green” terrace to come. Note a couple of curious things: no fence or guard-rails at the edge. Hmmmm. . . . Also notice how thin the roof is. Do you really suppose it could support the growth of mature trees? I’d say, not a chance. What are they thinking?

James Howard Kunstler is an artist and investigative journalist. See his website here.