Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [38]
Until 1968, French architects were still being trained almost exclusively at the conformist École de Beaux-Arts, which certainly shows in most of the early structures erected in the skyscraper district of La Défense Click here. It can also be seen in buildings like the Unesco building (Map), erected in 1958 southwest of the École Militaire in the 7e, and the unspeakable, 210m-tall Tour Montparnasse (1973; Click here), whose architects, in our opinion, should have been driven in tumbrels to the place de la Concorde and guillotined.
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CONTEMPORARY
France owes many of its most attractive and successful contemporary buildings in Paris to the narcissism of its presidents. For centuries France’s leaders have sought to immortalise themselves by erecting huge public edifices – known as grands projets – in the capital, and the recent past has been no different. The late president Georges Pompidou commissioned the once reviled but now beloved Centre Beaubourg (Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, 1977), later renamed the Centre Pompidou, in which the architects – in order to keep the exhibition halls as spacious and uncluttered as possible – put the building’s insides outside.
Pompidou’s successor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, was instrumental in transforming the derelict Gare d’Orsay train station into the glorious Musée d’Orsay, a design carried out by the Italian architect Gaeltana Aulenti in 1986. Jacques Chirac’s only grand projet of 12 years in office was the magnificent Musée du Quai Branly, the first major art gallery to open in Paris since the Centre Pompidou. By contrast, his predecessor François Mitterrand, with his decided preference for the modern, surpassed all of the postwar presidents with a dozen or so monumental projects in Paris costing taxpayers a whopping €4.6 billion.
Since the early 1980s, Paris has seen the construction of such structures as IM Pei’s controversial Grande Pyramide (1989; see Musée du Louvre, Click here), a glass pyramid that serves as the main entrance to the hitherto sacrosanct – and untouchable – Louvre and an architectural cause célèbre in the late 1980s; the city’s second opera house, the tile-clad Opéra Bastille (1989; Click here) designed by Canadian Carlos Ott; the monumental Grande Arche de la Défense Click here by Danish architect Johan-Otto von Sprekelsen, which opened in 1989; the delightful Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse (1990; Click here) and Cité de la Musique (1994; Click here), designed by Christian de Portzamparc and serving as a sort of gateway from the city to the whimsical Parc de la Villette; the twinned Grandes Serres (Great Greenhouses) built by Patrick Berger in 1992 at the main entrance to the Parc André Citroën (Map); the Ministère de l’Économie, des Finances et de l’Industrie (Click here) designed by Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro in 1990, with its striking ‘pier’ overhanging the Seine in Bercy; and the four glass towers of Dominique Perrault’s Bibliothèque Nationale de France (National Library of France;), which opened in 1995.
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FOR FURTHER INFORMATION
Those wanting to learn more about French architecture should visit the new Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in the Palais de Chaillot. Contemporary architecture in the capital is the focus of the permanent exhibition called ‘Paris, Visite Guidée’ (Paris, a Guided Tour) at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal (Map; 01 42 76 33 97; www.pavillon-arsenal.com; 21 blvd Morland, 4e; admission free; 10.30am-6.30pm Tue-Sat, 11am-7pm Sun; Sully Morland), which is the city’s town-planning and architectural centre. It also has rotating exhibits.
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One of the most beautiful and successful of the late-20th-century modern buildings in Paris is the Institut du Monde Arabe, a highly praised structure that opened in 1987 and successfully mixes modern and traditional