Playing with Light: Paris to Build ‘Shadowless’ Glass Pyramid Skyscraper
The ‘City of Lights’ seeks to innovate, to touch the sky, and to protect the “right to light” of its citizens, in one bold design
CafeSentido.com :: A revolutionary skyscraper design by Herzog and de Meuron, commonly known as ‘the Triangle’, aims to break the long-standing Parisian height barrier of 37 meters, while respecting the right of neighbors to the same quantity of sunlight they would have without the new structure. The Guardian has called it a ’shade-less ziggurat’, reference both to its irregular stepped-pyramid shape and to its playing a central role in the evolution of the spirit of the times, in design terms, in a city whose emblematic architecture is, somehow, also a sacred essence.
The question of the “right to light” is vital to zoning laws in many European cities. In London, for instance, something called the “Ancient Lights” law requires that any window which has enjoyed sunlight exposure for more than 20 years should go one receiving that light. It has been a source of heated polemics in the construction of new high-rise office towers in the historic city center, but for many, the innovation associated with new building designs has helped to offset the community-quality concerns that often militate against the installation of new megastructures.
For the city of Paris, the skyscraper question is a question of community quality, but also of cultural identity. The city has long had a skyscraper ban, a building limit of 37 meters, and an officially sanctioned aim of retaining an historic low-rise or “human-scale” built environment. This was, in part, to privilege historic structures, like the Left Bank’s Eiffel Tower and the Notre Dame cathedral on Ile de la Cité, to ensure the resonance of these structures is not overshadowed in figurative terms by block-like modern behemoths.
Paris is not a skyscraper city, but a city of infamously confusing concentric avenues, medieval layout superimposed with 18th century statesmanesque grandeur, romantic cobblestone tussled streets and sun-dappled sidewalk cafés. It is a city that prides itself on not having fallen for what an architectural convention in Barcelona in the mid-nineties termed “the temptation of America”, to build upward to the sky, disregarding the meaning of the pedestrian trolling around in the shadows below.
It is clear that there is a conscious distinction, in the minds of Parisians, between the nature of a city that lives for its inhabitants and a skyscraper-strewn metropolis, famed for its overwhelming brute mass and anonymity. It is thought that the low-rise atmosphere of Parisian haunts is more transcendent, that a neighborhood is more resilient, more character-driven, more time-tested, when it can be felt to be shaped by the people who walk among its structures.
Inhabitants of London or New York would probably balk at the suggestion, however theoretical, that their cities are somehow not like that, but they might also feel somehow haunted by the need to avoid falling into the “temptation of Dubai”, where it seems artifice and surface are overtaking character or the meaning of the human soul walking at street-level, as governing principles in the evolution of society. But these are perceptions, and in Paris, there are at least 6 new high-rise projects aiming to populate the outskirts of the historic metropolis with a post-modern outcropping of glass and steel, a hint that the city is also a place of renewal and innovation.
Herzog and de Meuron’s glass ziggurat is a test of post-modern and computer assisted design, intended to bridge the gap between need-for-use and the natural fear of human diminishment in the face of massive structures. Can the city reinvent itself as a cozy if weighty centuries’ old “museum city”, courted and elevated by the bold urgings of today’s grandiloquent noise-maker architects? Will the shadowless Triangle be like a dreamcatcher, holding up a subconscious portrait of the city’s will and destiny to the buzz and brimming of the historic center?
Aside from its central design feature, that of casting no shadow, or more precisely, of preserving the daylight-rights of the neighbors, the Paris Triangle will also be optimized for solar-voltaic and wind-power harvesting, making it a potential watershed moment in French green building design. If implemented with not merely current, but 2012-current —the date the building is slated to open for business— state of the art renewable energy technologies, the building could be self-powering and could help to generate clean energy for the Paris energy market, a further reinvention of the role of skyscrapers in a city wary of their social side-effects.
DeZeen design magazine cites the architects’ own report on the Projet Triangle:
On the scale of the Porte de Versailles site, the project will also play a significant role in the reorganisation of flows and perception of urban space. The Parc des Expositions site currently forms a break between the Haussmanian fabric of the15th district of Paris and the communities of Issy-les-Moulineaux and Vanves, emphasised by the visual impact of the peripheral boulevard.
The construction of an ambitious building on the Porte de Versailles site will mark its opening and restore the historical axis formed by the rue de Vaugirard and avenue Ernest Renan.
The square of the Porte de Versailles is a complex space in its current configuration. Its initial semi-circular organisation is difficult to interpret given the many visual impediments and lack of clearly identified public spaces between the Parc des Expositions and the buildings opposite.
The project is designed to open public space, to revitalize the surrounding area, and with its street-level shops, cafés and restaurants, to help invigorate the public use of private space, in Parisian style, with added life and activity: in short, the project is conceived as a model new space that considers human use the principle, and aesthetic ambition an aid to achieving that end.
While admitting the project is ambitious and large in scale, and while declaring it to be conceived on the entire metropolitan reach of Paris as a whole, the architects have designed the ’sharkfin’ structure to be both bold and noticeable, and also to stay out of the way of people’s needs and tastes. It is intended to complement, not to overshadow, the style of the older structures, and its height is offset by its narrow frame (from two sides), allowing for only a negligible shadow to fall from it, a shadow which will move quickly with the sun.
If properly executed, the structure will open up the public spaces around it, affording locals the same freedom of movement and atmospheric enjoyment they now have, but with the added value of a monument to urban renewal and a vibrant center of commercial activity. In the more abstract sense, the architects also note that:
The Triangle is conceived as a piece of the city that could be pivoted and positioned vertically. It is carved by a network of vertical and horizontal traffic flows of variable capacities and speeds. Like the boulevards, streets and more intimate passages of a city, these traffic flows carve the construction into islets of varying shapes and sizes.
This evocation of the urban fabric of Paris, at once classic and coherent in its entirety and varied and intriguing in its details, is encountered in the façade of the Triangle. Like that of a classical building, this one features two levels of interpretation: an easily recognisable overall form and a fine, crystalline silhouette of its façade which allows it to be perceived variously.
The Triangle is meant to evoke the “role of the reader”: the public can make of it what they will, as it stands up above the landscape as an outgrowth of the pie-piece urban sections that fan out from the ancient city-center. It mimics and mirrors the landscape, with a geometry that merges with surface style to permit a broad range of interpretations, emotional and functional. In this sense, it is very much attuned to the cultural identity that underpins a time-tested Parisian way of interacting with local architecture.
J.E. Robertson @ October 9, 2008