A Defense of the Ugliest Building in Paris

The sole skyscraper in central Paris celebrated its fiftieth anniversary recently, though “celebrate” may not be le mot juste. When the city’s official Twitter account wished the Tour Montparnasse (“Montparnasse Tower”) a happy birthday, the responses were hostile even by the standards of that platform, ranging from “Quelle horreur” to “La pire chose qui soit arrivée à Paris depuis les Nazis” (“The worst thing to happen to Paris since the Nazis”) to simply “Non.” Since I happened to be in town, I went to visit Paris’s least beloved building for the commemoration of its first half century. Nothing was out of the ordinary for a quiet Sunday afternoon: Falun Gong members sat in cross-legged protest on the concrete plaza; rough sleepers huddled against the walls and stairways of the complex’s shopping center; T-shirted tourists went straight up to, and came straight down from, the fifty-sixth floor.

That floor is occupied by a panoramic observation deck, which offers the most expansive view of Paris from above—and, more important, the only such view that doesn’t show the Tour Montparnasse itself. That oft-heard half-joke repurposes a similarly waspish remark attributed to the playwright Tristan Bernard about the Eiffel Tower, which, despite his resentment, has become a globally beloved symbol of French civilization. It’s a rare Paris postcard that fails to include the older tower, and a rarer Paris postcard still that fails to exclude the newer one. (Even the hooded sweatshirts for sale in the Tour Montparnasse’s own gift shop bear the image of the Eiffel Tower.) Nowhere else has such a physically conspicuous building arguably made so little obvious cultural impact; if, after fifty years, Parisians no longer ignore the Tour Montparnasse, that may be because they no longer see it in the first place.

One can hardly deny feeling something un-Parisian, even anti-Parisian, exuded by the dark, Kubrickian slab rising out of its nineteenth-century surroundings. But nor, on closer inspection, can one deny the traces of élan in its design. In “La Tour Montparnasse 1973-2013,” the French journalists Sylvie Andreu and Michèle Leloup’s history and collection of reflections published for the building’s fortieth anniversary, the late architect Michel Holley, who was initially involved in the project, praises “the fissures that lighten its shape and its oval character, along with the lateral indentation.” Another deceased peer, Claude Parent, adds that “it wasn’t quite the modern American skyscraper, the glass parallelepiped, but something different, a European flavour, with ledges. They showed a certain quest for form in the vocabulary of the parallelepiped: that touch of visible architecture with its lateral folds, which straighten it and give it its verticality. It is intelligent, this tower, and if it was deliberate . . . so much the better!”

Many of those quoted in the book who express appreciation for the Tour Montparnasse belong to the architectural professions. This will hardly come as a surprise to detractors who file it alongside Boston’s brutalist City Hall as structures only an architect could love. Boston City Hall and the Tour Montparnasse were once ranked the ugliest and second-ugliest building in the world, respectively, but, apart from standing over the kind of plaza invariably described as “windswept,” the two have little in common. The standard rebuttal to enthusiasts of Boston City Hall is that, however intensely they may appreciate its aesthetics, they don’t have to spend their days inside it. If the Tour Montparnasse lacks brutalism’s raw-concrete sublimity, it also lacks that style’s propensity to practical dysfunction. In the words of the architect and urban designer Virginie Picon-Lefebvre, one of the main experts called to comment on the building’s fiftieth anniversary, “it was really comfortable to work there.”

Indeed, the Tour Montparnasse was conceived as a means of introducing high-tech modernity into postwar Paris, which, though spared widespread bombing, had nevertheless fallen over time into a state of general dilapidation. This function secured the building a perhaps unexpected supporter: André Malraux, the novelist, art theorist, and decorated Resistance member, who was appointed as France’s first-ever Minister of Cultural Affairs under Charles de Gaulle, in 1959. A somewhat contradictory figure, Malraux was both aesthete and public official (a combination difficult to imagine outside France), and also an advocate for both preservation and modernization. Out of the former impulse came, among other projects, the restoration and subsequent architectural lockdown of the once aristocratic, now trendy district of Le Marais; the latter enabled the construction of the Tour Montparnasse, as part of a neighborhood-wide development scheme that necessitated eliminating not just several streets but also forty-four hundred homes that constituted “îlots insalubres” (“unsanitary islets”).

In “La Tour Montparnasse 1973-2013,” Jean Digne, then the president of the now defunct Musée du Montparnasse, relates having heard that seven hundred artists’ studios were also destroyed in the process. This must have underscored definitively that Montparnasse was no longer the bohemian paradise of the interwar period, when it had been the quarter of choice for Picasso, Dalí, Modigliani, Hemingway, Beckett. Even in their day, the neighborhood’s infrastructure strained to accommodate its population: the rail station Gare Montparnasse, from 1852, was put forth as a candidate for replacement in the nineteen-thirties. More than twenty years passed before that project began in earnest, by which time it had expanded to include a set of residential buildings, a commercial center, and the tower. Just as Chaillot hill has the Trocadéro, the Place de l’Étoile the Arc de Triomphe, Montmartre the Sacré-Cœur, and Mount Saint-Geneviève the Panthéon, Malraux reportedly proclaimed in the late fifties, “Montparnasse will have its landmark!”

Only after nearly a decade of political squabbling and financial difficulty (cleared up thanks to the bracingly pragmatic intervention of the American real-estate developer Wylie F. L. Tuttle) did the project’s building permit come through. The Tour Montparnasse opened on June 18, 1973, fifteen years after it was first proposed. By that time, it looked less like a bold declaration about the future than a faintly embarrassing relic of the past. Eugène Beaudouin, Urbain Cassan, Louis de Hoÿm de Marien, and Jean Saubot, the architects who had collaborated on the building’s design, were hardly youthful revolutionaries in the first place. (Beaudouin and Cassan were born in the nineteenth century.) Les Trente Glorieuses, France’s thirty-year period of rapid postwar economic growth, was running its course. “The party was over and architecture was screwed,” Parent says in “La Tour Montparnasse 1973-2013.” “The momentum of the 1950s, exciting for everyone, even the public, was fading.”

Nor did any appetite remain for tall buildings. In 1977, a thirty-seven-metre height limit was imposed within Paris, exiling high-rises to outlying districts like the business center of La Défense. (In 2010, at the behest of then mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, the limit was raised to a hundred and eighty metres for offices and fifty metres for housing in specific areas.) “The new skyscraper on the Boulevard du Montparnasse is almost an accident,” Saul Bellow wrote, after a visit in the early nineteen-eighties, “something that had strayed away from Chicago and come to rest on a Parisian street corner.” Unremarkable though it would look in a major American city, the Tour Montparnasse is made ridiculous by its isolation in Paris. A few politicians have proposed knocking it down (easier said than done, given the three-hundred-way division of the complex’s ownership), but the problem of its supposed ugliness could just as well be solved by changing its context: surrounding it with a cluster of other towers, or even punctuating the whole of the city—tastefully, bien sûr—with skyscrapers.

Such solutions assume that the lessons of the Tour Montparnasse have been learned. Observers bemoan everything from its height to its interruption of the line of perspective down Rue de Rennes (an objection that may strike Americans as a parody of French fussiness) to its gray-brown color, which, as the journalist and architect Philippe Trétiack says, in “La Tour Montparnasse 1973-2013,” “has a touch of the nicotine stain about it.” Several of the book’s contributors identify the tower’s truly unforgivable sin as the fact that it is built atop a broad concrete base. Trétiack calls this design element, a common feature of skyscrapers of the sixties and seventies, “a rupture in the urban fabric,” framing it as an expression of a classic French tendency in the organization of space: “It is our Versailles side, our yearnings for power that force everyone to climb flights of stairs to access the ‘thing,’ to penetrate the building.”