For 53 years, the Tour Montparnasse has tarnished the Paris skyline, a brown mass so detested that some locals describe it as the box the Eiffel Tower came in. Others joke that the best view of Paris is from the tower’s 56th floor observation deck, because it’s the only place you can’t see.
But now the ugliest building in the world’s most beautiful city will undergo a long-awaited makeover, both the 210-meter tower (the only skyscraper in low-ceilinged Paris) and its surroundings, led by a desolate and almost deserted shopping center, where homeless Parisians sometimes pitch tents.
Nouvelle AOM, a consortium of French architects, is reinventing the skyscraper as a lighter, more transparent structure, its vertical lines interrupted by vegetated terraces and a lush rooftop garden.
The task of renovating the shopping center was left to Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who became famous in the 1970s for the Center Pompidou, a major cultural center. Its postmodernist design, with the structure and facilities on display, also scandalized Parisians at the time, although, unlike what happened with the Tour Montparnasse, their opinion softened as the decades passed.
Having transformed Paris’s cityscape in the past, Piano insisted in an interview that he was simply “fixing up” this 1970s relic. He proposes fragmenting the towering concrete platform at the tower’s base to create what he envisions as an extension of the neighborhood, with winding pedestrian walkways and a tree-lined plaza.
“We are not demolishing everything; we are transforming,” Piano said in his beehive-like studio in central Paris. “It is not true that everything has to be demolished. In any case, it is impossible.”
It’s not that the idea of demolishing the tower wouldn’t appeal to many Parisians, including some who defend the remodeling project.
“If I could demolish the Tour Montparnasse and turn it into a garden, I would be very happy,” said Philippe Goujon, conservative mayor of Paris’s 15th arrondissement, which shares the sprawling complex with two other arrondissements, the Sixth and the 14th. However, that would be economically unviable, Goujon said, adding that he did not want “the best to be the enemy of the good.”
Piano’s proposal, he said, would revitalize the area in authentic Parisian style; if not recreating the Montparnasse of the 1920s, which attracted Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce, then at least having a pleasant offering of rooftop cafes, shops and play areas instead of today’s dystopian environment.
Like many expensive urban renewal projects — this one will likely exceed $700 million — the proposed redevelopment of Tour Montparnasse has dragged on for years, tangled in politics, money and competing visions. Now that the tower is scheduled to be emptied of tenants and closed to the public at the end of March, work may soon begin.
But the discussions continue.
Carine Petit, mayor of the 14th district, opposes the remodeling on the grounds that it is too commercial and will not leave enough free space for the public. Petit, who is a member of the left-wing Ecologists party, said that “the inhabitants, and even the tourists of Paris, do not need another shopping center.”
Caroline Morin, 37, who lives in Montparnasse and volunteers for animal protection groups, said the renovation would dislodge a colony of pigeons that nest on the roof of the shopping center. He said the promoters had not thought about how to move the birds without harming their chicks.
“Okay, they’re not necessarily very popular, but they’re there, they exist,” Morin said after participating in a neighborhood meeting about the project. “All they want is to start their families, raise their chicks.”
Paris, Morin noted, “is represented by doves: pigeons, baguettes and berets.”
One thing that does not represent Paris are skyscrapers. Public reaction to the tower was so hostile when it opened in 1973 that it virtually guaranteed that no other tall buildings would be built in the city (one exception, the Tour Triangle, is nearing completion in southwest Paris). Paris has exiled most of its skyscrapers to La Défense, a commercial district west of the city limits.
However, as the decades passed and against all odds, the tower became an icon. French urban climber Alain Robert climbed it several times. In 2001, he had a starring role in La Tour Montparnasse Infernale, a parody of the Die Hard action films in which two comedians, Éric Judor and Ramzy Bedia, play hapless window cleaners who find themselves caught up in a terrorist attack.
Countless tourists still flock to the observation deck to see the view, and the tower is included in the Paris Lego set. Until it closed last year, it had the tallest restaurant in Europe. And it was a respectable business address: its tenants included the campaign teams of two presidents, François Mitterrand and Emmanuel Macron.
Among architects, the Tour Montparnasse has always had its defenders. Daniel Libeskind, who oversaw the design of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan, praised it in T Magazine in 2015, saying: “Tour Montparnasse may not be genius, but it represented an idea of what the city of the future will have to be.”
Recently, Libeskind said he was in favor of redeveloping Tour Montparnasse, although he questioned the ambition of the tower and shopping center designs. Planting trees on the roof, he said, could make it more environmentally sustainable, but would barely alter the fundamental design.
“The reality is that we have moved away from taking a radical approach,” Libeskind said. “It’s a much more fearful time, civically.”
Piano’s proposal was an alternative solution after investors opposed a more extravagant redesign by British-Italian architect Richard Rogers. Rogers, who died in 2021, had been Piano’s partner at the Center Pompidou. Piano, now 88, remembered him as his revered “big brother,” with whom he broke all the rules when they won the competition to build the new cultural center in Paris in the late 1960s.
“You always have to capture the spirit of the moment,” he said.
And what is the spirit of this moment?
For starters, there is a sustainability imperative, Piano said. Its design leaves much of the structure intact and reuses concrete, reducing the carbon dioxide emitted during construction. Piano, whose buildings include the Shard in London and the New York Times Building in Manhattan, was careful not to criticize the original architecture of the Tour Montparnasse. But when asked if he would have designed something similar, even in the 1970s, he raised his eyebrows.
“The same year Beaubourg was being built?” he asked, using the colloquial name of the Pompidou Centre.
That brought Mr. Piano back to the idea of ”fixing.” In a world of limited resources, he said, there is value in building on existing structures, even those that are not appreciated, rather than tearing them down to raise something new. It’s also less risky. In the years after the Pompidou Center opened, Piano said, he avoided giving his name to Parisian taxi drivers to save himself a reprimand.
“I hope this is not like this,” he said of the new look of the Tour Montparnasse. “I don’t think so”.
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief for The Times. It covers the United Kingdom as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
Ségolène Le Stradic is a journalist and researcher covering France.
