The Lighthouse - Paris

[NYCDOC]

Even the French are getting on the skyscraper bandwagon . . . .


http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42366000/jpg/_42366128_phare_203l_afp.jpg


BBC

Paris skyscraper to rival tower


Paris has chosen an American architect to build the French capital's tallest new building since the Eiffel Tower in the 19th Century. The new curving skyscraper will be the centrepiece of a redevelopment project in the north-west of Paris.

Thom Mayne's Los Angeles-based company Morphosis beat off rivals as prestigious as the UK's Norman Foster and France's Jean Nouvel.
Building regulations have kept tall buildings out of Paris for 30 years.
One notable exception is the Tour Montparnasse which rises 180 metres (590 ft) in the south-west of the capital.
An international jury announced the winner, following a contest organised by French property group Unibail as part of a project to revamp La Defense business district.

The Paris city government opposes plans for a new skyscraper in the district, but the project is backed by French public body EPAD, which is in charge of the district's wider renovation, AFP news agency reports.

Ecobuilding
At 300 metres (990 ft), the Lighthouse will come a close second to the Eiffel Tower, which rises to 324 metres.


It is due to be completed in 2012 and will cost an estimated 800m euros ($1.05bn) to build.
Its twin structure will combine a rectangular base with a soaring, organic-shaped tower, capped by a field of wind turbines.
Unibail described the project as an "architectural event... that pays tribute to the major buildings in La Defense - the CNIT and the Great Arch".
Last year, Thom Mayne was awarded the Pritzker prize, the world's top architecture award.
"It's about an icon, and one of the major buildings in Paris," he said of the winning project.
He added the building would be "a prototype for a green building" with a wind farm generating its own heating and a "double skin" of steel and glass to a self-cooling mechanism for the hotter months.
His works include Los Angeles' new mass transit hub, the Taipei Design Centre and Seoul's Sun Tower.

[TREPYE]

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42366000/jpg/_42366128_phare_203l_afp.jpg



Cool! ;) I love the dissoving effect up top.

[pianoman11686]

Mayne sure seems to be at the forefront of American, cutting-edge architecture. I wonder what he'd come up with for a New York skyscraper.

[newcastle kid]

Renders found on Skyscraper City:
It's... quite weird
http://static.flickr.com/112/308428624_fca3ac2148_o.jpg
http://www.ladefense.fr/forum/epadago/projetmorphosis.jpg
http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/8733/morphosisbis1024x768ef3.jpg

[ablarc]

Ugh. It's a slug.

[lofter1]

with windmills for tentacles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slug) http://forums.randi.org/images/smilies/mazeguyanimals/slug.gif

[MidtownGuy]

I love it, except in the larger rendering the spikes at the top look awkward. With some refinement the dissolving effect could be good.

[lofter1]

Complete NY Times Architectural Review of this project by Nicolai Ouroussoff HERE (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=133955&postcount=7)

Towers Will Change the Look of Two World Cities

nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/arts/design/04towe.html?ref=arts)
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
December 4, 2006

Architecture

The current mania for flamboyant skyscrapers has been a mixed blessing for architecture. While it has yielded a stunning outburst of creativity, it has also created an atmosphere in which novelty is often prized over innovation. At times it’s as if the architects were dog owners proudly parading their poodles in front of a frivolous audience.

This mad new world was much in evidence last week when planners announced the results of two major international competitions that included some of the world’s brightest architectural luminaries. In each case, a tower design will significantly alter the skyline of one of the world’s most beloved cities. But while the design for the Phare Tower in Paris is a work of sparkling originality that wrestles thoughtfully with the urban conflicts of the city’s postwar years, the other, the gargantuan Gazprom City in St. Petersburg, Russia, is a bone-chilling expression of corporate ego run amok.

Together, they train a lens on the range of architectural approaches to a daunting problem: the clash between the classical city and the inflated scale of the new global economy. And they underscore the limits of the creative imagination when it is detached from historical memory.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/04/arts/Our1190.jpg
Unibail-Morphosis
Thom Mayne’s design for the Phare Tower in La Défense, Paris.

Designed by Thom Mayne of the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis, the Phare Tower will rise amid the office towers of La Défense, the western business district conceived in the late 1950s as a way of expanding the city while protecting its historic core from overdevelopment. Embedded in this maze of generic towers and blank plazas, the tower will overlook the hollow cube of the 1989 Grande Arche and the elegantly arched concrete roof of the 1958 C.N.I.T. conference center ...

Mr. Mayne dug deeper into the site’s convoluted history to create a building of hypnotic power. Viewed from central Paris, the building’s gauzy skin, draped tautly over the tower’s undulating form, will have the look of luxurious fabric. But as you draw closer, the forms will appear more muscular, with massive crisscrossing steel beams supporting a perforated metal surface.

The aura of the veil has a titillating vibe, but there is nothing superficial about this design. By drawing on what energy the site has — a tangle of roadways and underground trains — the tower transcends La Défense’s deadening urban reputation. Supported by a series of gargantuan steel legs evoking a tripod, the tower straddles the site, allowing pedestrian and train traffic to flow directly underneath. The skin lifts up to envelop a nearby plaza, linking it to an underground train station. Beneath this perforated metal skirt, gigantic escalators shoot up more than 100 feet to a lobby packed with restaurants and cafes.

The approach recalls the machine-age fascination with physical and social mobility that yielded masterpieces like the Gare de Lyon in Paris and Grand Central Terminal in New York. Pushing the idea further, Mr. Mayne rips the top off an existing plaza to reveal the trains and traffic passing underneath. As you ride up escalators linking the plaza to the lobby, seams open up in the building’s skin to create vertiginous views of both an underground world of shadowy figures and the monuments of the beloved city past the Arc de Triomphe to the east.

The notion of building as machine is tempered by the structure’s earnest environmental agenda. Double-layered skin on the south side of the building will deflect the harshest sunlight. On the north side, the surface peels apart to reveal transparent glass skin. The tower’s peak, conceived as an extension of the skin, seemingly fraying apart in the breeze, consists of a cluster of antennas and a wind farm that will generate electric power.

By embracing a populist lineage that stretches back through the Pompidou Center’s exoskeletal structure to the grand lobby of Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera, Mr. Mayne extracts unexpected beauty from this psychologically isolated site. In so doing, he redeems a scorned area of the city while forging one of the most powerful works Paris has seen in a generation ...


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[kz1000ps]

A render I did to compare Boston's propsed new tallest with other designs:

http://img165.imageshack.us/img165/8283/winthropsquareparisud0.png (http://imageshack.us)

And this, done by MayDay at SSP, sums up my feelings:

http://www.clevelandskyscrapers.com/tourseacucumber.jpg


Can't wait until we have 400 meter bubinga trees on our skylines..

[lofter1]

Can't wait until we have 400 meter bubinga trees on our skylines.

Don't know that I'd want to be anywhere near one of those (http://loreak.com/arbol_ficha.asp?Id=9) ...

http://loreak.com/arboles/bubinga.gif

[lofter1]

I'd feel much safer in the vicinity of a bubinga thing (http://www.danykellergalerie.de/kuenstler/S_Huber.htm) shaped like this ...

http://www.danykellergalerie.de/bilder/Huber/Bubinga.jpg

[kz1000ps]

SSP.. always good for a laugh

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v496/Fatmonkey/ParisOldMan.jpg

[BryanSereny]

SSP.. always good for a laugh

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v496/Fatmonkey/ParisOldMan.jpg

Looks like you had a premonition of future Graffiti. I like it!

[nick-taylor]

This is not good for Paris - granted it might be 300m.....but its pretty vulgar. Of these images, only the far right one actually look reasonable (but even then you have that unsightly block marring the view)...the one in the middle has been left exposed for some peculiar reason, while the far left image is what I believe the perspective you will see from most viewpoints in Paris - in other words scary!

Its almost as it the architects have looked at the base of the Bishopsgate Tower, the curve of the Walkie Talkie, the bracing of the Swiss RE and blended them all in one mess...


http://static.flickr.com/117/310922985_d005d035d4_o.jpg

[ablarc]

Truly ghastly.

[lofter1]

Truly ghastly.

kind of ghostly (http://www.fashionologie.com/photos/oh_the_places_ive_been/ghost_of_bernadette_soubirous.html), too ...

http://www.fashionologie.com/photos/oh_the_places_ive_been/ghost_of_bernadette_soubirous.JPG

[Citytect]

Dr. Seuss does architecture... from the grave?

The crazy steel frame is interesting at the base.

[Kris]

December 19, 2006
A Defiant Architect’s Gentler Side
By ROBIN POGREBIN

Slide Show (http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2006/12/18/arts/design/20061219_MAYNE_SLIDESHOW_1.html)

LOS ANGELES — Can it be that Thom Mayne, the architect of confrontation, has gone soft?

His acclaimed design for Paris’s tallest office building, chosen on Dec. 1, is an elegant silhouette draped in a diaphanous skin, a far cry from the sharp corners, violent eruptions and fragmented forms that led some to call him the architect of dislocation.

“I’ve shown a softer side; my wife is really teasing me,” Mr. Mayne, 62, said in an interview at Morphosis, his firm in Santa Monica. “The sensuousness of Paris found its way into the project.”

He likened the building, the Phare Tower, to a “layered dress” or a woman’s slip. “The skin becomes primary, the body secondary,” Mr. Mayne said. “It becomes metabolic, the skin. It moves.”

The centerpiece of a rethinking of La Défense, a coldly received office district on Paris’s western outskirts, his eco-friendly tower seems to rise organically from its base, sloping gently upward before peaking in delicate fragments that will serve as wind turbines.

Mr. Mayne triumphed over some of the hottest architects in the world in this competition: Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron; Rem Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel. In The New York Times, Nicolai Ouroussoff commended the choice, calling the tower “a work of sparkling originality that wrestles thoughtfully with the urban conflicts of the city’s postwar years.”

Mr. Mayne said the building was still a work in progress; he spent only three months on his design entry before submitting it. While the surface is currently perforated stainless steel, for example, he said it might be something else entirely by the time he is finished. He said he had enlisted a fashion photographer to shoot the site over an extended period, photographing it at different times as he revolved around it, so Mr. Mayne can get a sense of how the light shifts throughout the day and seasons.

“I’m not sure what will happen,” he said of the design, speaking with his usual intensity.

“I produce something, attack it, it moves, it changes, it responds to the nature of that critique,” he continued. “It happens reiteratively till we’ve exhausted the idea. Then it’s complete, it’s done. I’m not done. I just started.”

While his forms may have changed then, his methodology apparently remains consistent: He breaks things down before figuring out how to put them together; he upends traditional expectations. For his hulking Caltrans District 7 headquarters in Los Angeles, housing the state agency that oversees the city’s freeway system, Mr. Mayne rejected the downtown area’s standard towers and plazas in favor of a vast urban lobby carved through its core. To eerie effect, he created a perforated metal facade whose mechanized panels open and close, transforming the structure’s highly animated face as day gives way to night.

At the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in Manhattan, where he designed a new engineering school and art studios, Mr. Mayne defiantly played off the ponderous 19th-century Foundation Building across the street, creating a hivelike glass atrium in which students can be viewed crossing back and forth between labs and studios.

Last year when he captured the Pritzker Prize, the profession’s Nobel, he was saluted for carrying the rebellious spirit of the 1960s and a “fervent desire for change” into his practice, “the fruits of which are only now becoming visible in a group of large-scale projects.”

Of course there are always the commissions that got away, like the redesign of Rutgers University’s flagship campus in New Brunswick, N.J. (Enrique Norten won last week), and the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, to be designed by Richard Rogers.

Perhaps most stingingly, Mr. Mayne was dumped (his term) last year, in his own backyard, from the ambitious Grand Avenue project, a retail-commercial development by the Related Companies in downtown Los Angeles. (He was replaced by Frank Gehry.)

In response to such setbacks, Mr. Mayne is preparing to open a New York office so he can physically be more front and center for potential clients. (He said he also plans to split time between there and Los Angeles.) And despite his brash reputation, Mr. Mayne said he has long since realized that diplomacy is a requirement.

He said: “Do I provoke as a method of investigation? Of course. That’s the essence of architecture. Do I do it with gusto? I do. At the same time, do I listen? My clients would tell you I’m a farm boy from Tipton, Ind.” (Born in Waterbury, Conn., he moved to Tipton as an infant.)

“I enjoy working with people,” he said. “I understand that as a necessity. And clearly that’s something that develops as you get older. And I’ve grown into that.”

Still, that role has been something of an adjustment for an architect who founded Morphosis in 1972 in opposition to the typical forms of contemporary architecture, which in his view failed to address the dislocations in modern society. The same year, he helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture, with the goal of fostering critical thinking about the profession.

“I have an image of myself — drawing, provoking, conceptualizing,” he said. ”I’m in some sort of space between the investigative world of academia and the world of architecture. All of a sudden now I’m in a position of authority.”

But Mr. Mayne worked with what some might consider one of the most conservative clients of all: the United States government. He designed three projects under the General Services Administration’s program to promote “design excellence” in architecture, including a federal office building in San Francisco; a federal courthouse in Eugene, Ore.; and a satellite station for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration outside Washington.

“Obviously, those are buildings that require negotiation,” he said. “I couldn’t be too bad.”

Mr. Mayne said he had to parse even the smallest detail on these projects, though he had come to accept such detailed back-and-forth as routine. With the courthouse, for example, he spent an inordinate amount of time on the perforated metal privacy panels that attach to the judge’s benches.

“We had probably four meetings on the color, the height, the diameter,” Mr. Mayne said. “Multiply that times a thousand, and that’s what the project was.”

“It’s called maturity, I guess,” he added. “It’s not facility because you’re probably born with facility. You’re increasing your accessibility to options.”

As the options have multiplied, so has his workload; Mr. Mayne continues to log long hours with no respite in sight. “In architecture you arrive so late,” he reflected. “I look at doctors, lawyers I know, and they’re all buying boats and bailing out at 62. My career is just getting started.”

He and his wife of 25 years, Blythe, are not intent on amassing creature comforts: they live in the same 1,400-square-foot house where they raised their children, now 23 and 19.

“Now that I’m making money, I don’t want anything,” he said. “The part that changes is, I’m building an institution. I’m institutionalizing my studio and building a sophistication.”

Strange as it is to hear this former outsider talk about “institionalizing,” Mr. Mayne also insisted that he had not lost his maverick zeal. Part of his responsibility as an architect will always be telling it as he sees it, he maintained, not telling clients what they want to hear.

“I fought violently for the autonomy of architecture,” he said. “It’s a very passive, weak profession where people deliver a service. You want a blue door, you get a blue door. You want it to look neo-Spanish, you get neo-Spanish.

“Architecture with any authenticity represents resistance. Resistance is a good thing.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

http://m1.freeshare.us/127fs2011428.jpg

http://m1.freeshare.us/127fs2012098.jpg

http://m1.freeshare.us/127fs2011764.jpg

http://m1.freeshare.us/127fs2011641.jpg

http://m1.freeshare.us/127fs2011858.jpg

http://www.archicool.com/expos/tours/004.jpg

http://skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=404537&page=25


Losing proposals (http://skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=431635)

[ablarc]

Worse than ghastly.

Pointless.

[homeandaway]

sounds very, very interesting!.
~Alex~