France: Changing the Skyline

There was hell to pay in Paris when Gustave Eiffel built his 984-ft. tower for the Paris Exposition in 1889. There was still more when he did not tear it down afterward. Now the graceful Parisian skyline will be altered even more drastically—by a proposed 55-story office building that will loom over Saint-Germain-des-Prés like an enormous elliptical cigarette case, dwarf Notre Dame and top out 20 feet higher than the lofty tip of Sacré-Coeur.

The 565-ft. skyscraper, constructed of concrete and glass trimmed with bronze-anodized aluminum, will form the central element in the $160 million Maine-Montparnasse redevelopment project being built on the site of the gutted Gare Montparnasse. It will import from New York City the shape, roughly, of the Pan Am Building, the color and texture of Mies van der Robe’s Seagram tower. The skyscraper complex will include a five-story, 250-room hotel, a department store, restaurants, galleries, shops, a skating rink, a movie theater and a 1,500-car underground parking lot. Near by will be two office-apartment buildings (one 20, the other 19 stories tall) and a 15-story building, which will also house the new railroad station.

The 20-acre Maine-Montparnasse project—named for two bordering streets, Avenue du Maine and Boulevard du Montparnasse—involves four French architects, eight of France’s largest contracting and building-materials companies, five French banks and three corporations that may become tenants.

Despite the French government’s general policy of discouraging foreign —particularly U.S.—investment in France, three American firms are also participating. The wholly owned French subsidiary of Collins Tuttle & Co. of New York, a leading developer of high-rise commercial structures, is managing the financing of the $100 million tower. The Chicago architectural firm of A. Epstein and Sons, and Diesel Construction Co. of New York—a primary contractor in the Pan Am Building—are acting as consultants.

Construction of the skyscraper complex, a scant 20 minutes by car from the Champs-Élysées, six minutes by rooftop helicopter from Orly and second only to the Pentagon in floor space (3,024,000 sq. ft.), will begin in 1968, provided the Paris Municipal Sites Commission bestows its imprimatur on the building, as expected, by Christmas.