Looming Debate, by Veronique Vienne (Metropolis Magazine)

One of Delanoë’s priorities has been to blur the line separating affluent Parisians from their often less privileged neighbors. In the last decades, Paris has steadily lost its working-class residents, who migrate to poorer bedroom communities beyond the city limits—a trend Delanoë wants to stop.

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Whether it will work remains to be seen, but this solution is a typical Delanoë move. The former head of a PR agency, the mayor likes projects that “speak”—those that tell a good story and make his political intentions clear.

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“He is clever, even mischievous. In this town, it’s the only way to be innovative while respecting the fetters of tradition.”

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promote small punctual interventions that improve the quality of life of Parisians. He is less supportive of projects that flaunt the vitality of corporations and financial institutions eager to pitch towering office buildings inside Paris

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For tall structures to be erected, Delanoë would have to change existing regulations that cap the height of buildings at 82 feet in the center of Paris

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Delanoë would rather spend taxpayers’ money improving the urban experience than sweetening deals to attract big investment.

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He knows that living well is the most effective business incentive and the reason everyone wants to come to Paris.

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The capital can no longer afford to be a museum of its glorious past. It needs to jump over the beltway, reach out to the suburbs, and become the center of the metropolis that encircles it.

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But under the pretext of helping him achieve this goal, Delanoë’s political opponents are launching a campaign, spear­­headed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, to create a new administrative chain of command to supervise the economic development of a new urban entity that would incorporate the capital and its suburbs, an area whose outer boundaries are still to be determined but that has already been named Grand Paris. In the wrong hands, this proposal might be used to undermine Del­anoë’s authority. And, indeed, recently reelected by a landslide vote that reaffirmed the left-leaning preferences of the historically defiant Parisians, the mayor has many enemies in the pro-business Sarkozy government.

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The question of Paris and its suburbs is linked to that of building heights because it is at the frontier between these two worlds that city planners propose to challenge the traditional size limits and build skyscrapers.

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Tall buildings are anathema here for many reasons. The City of Light is built atop a city of shadows. Paris is laid over a subterranean limestone quarry, its huge system of ancient tunnels weakening the ground. Its low-rise skyline is the product of geological circumstances. But there is another reality—a political one—that has shaped the way the city looks: Parisians don’t like authority. They’re an unruly bunch, known to tear down or burn symbols of oppression. In fact, the architectural form that is most typically Parisian is not the mansard roofline or the Haussmann facade but the barricade. A low struc­ture, usually made of a pile of cobblestones and pieces of trash from construction sites, it has been the type of edifice local residents choose most often to express their pol­itical views. Tall buildings in Paris? You must be kidding! To Parisians it would be an open invitation to dissent.

But Lion, like so many French architects, would like to see Paris compete in terms of contemporary architecture with cities like Barcelona, Berlin, and London. He says he enjoys working with clients in cities that are much more dynamic, much more creative—and much more polluted—than Paris, adding, “Yet at the same time, I can’t wait to fly back home where I can walk wherever I want and breathe freely. It’s not just the nice streets and the clean air I crave; it’s the democracy.” As annoying as it is, a convoluted “democratic” process safeguards the public good in Paris, he says. Indeed, in an unprecedented move, Delanoë has imposed on private developers the same time-consuming competition-and-jury review procedure foisted on public projects. “Things are so stagnant in this administratively driven city,” Lion says about this design-by-committee method, “but even I’m grateful for all the resistance. In Paris I feel there is hope for the human race. But they do get on my nerves!”

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“We want folks to apprehend Paris in another mode, in a less goal-oriented fashion,” Girard says, referring to the Situationist doctrine of the 1960s, a left-wing movement that advocated deliberate “disorientation” as a cure for conspicuous-consumption boredom.

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a generation influenced by the ideology of that time. His vision of Paris stems from a culture of dissent that condemned the constant hype required to sell consumer goods and products.

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“We’re here to do a city, not a collection of objects. A collection of objects never amounts to a city. Look at New York. There’s an array of amazing buildings there, but look at the poor quality of the public space! In contrast, compare this with the quality of the street­scape in Paris.”

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This antispectacular stance is a Delanoë trademark.

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The elegant translucent canopy that will spread its wings over Les Halles’s commercial center is indeed an unobtrusive structure, not the grand architectural gesture likely to appeal to Parisians who would like to see the city demonstrate the vitality of its financial community with truly dramatic buildings.

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Dominique Alba, director of the Paris Arsenal museum and the authority on contemporary architecture, bristles every time someone calls her hometown a museum city. “The architectural heritage of Paris is so rich, it swallows the most novel urban forms,” she explains. “There are plenty of exciting new buildings around, but they do not stick out.”

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Mercifully few and far between inside Paris, the tall apartment buildings and office towers that “stick out” were built in the 1970s in accordance with poorly understood Le Corbusier design principles.

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