Paris' approves "invisible" skyscraper

Photo: Herzogdemeuron.com

Paris has approved the construction of its first skyscraper in over 40 years. The Triangle, which met controversy when first proposed last year, has managed to win favour through one key achievement: it's invisible.

It may sound like a bizarre claim, but it is one that you could believe, given the brains behind it: the property is the child of none other than Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss architectural wizards behind the transformation of London's Bankside Power Station into the sleek Tate Modern.

Their building, which, unsurprisingly, takes the form of a triangle, will stretch almost 600 feet into the air - just over a third shorter than the iconic Eiffel Tower.

That height proved too much for Parisian tastes. Indeed, skyscrapers have largely been absent from the French capital's central skyline: the last to be built was the Montparnasse tower in 1973, a black oblong that sticks out from the stylish cityscape.

"While there’s a commercial logic in locating a tower in a zone with an exhibition Centre, the neighborhood as a whole is low-rise," wrote Foreign Policy of the Triangle in November 2014. "Buildings stand 100 feet at most, and the streetscape is that of 19th-century Paris. Even the Triangle’s greatest defenders would admit that, at 590 feet, it was wildly out of scale. Only the Eiffel Tower, the Grande Arche de La Défense, and a handful of the city’s other icons compare."

Since then, though, there has been a Change of heart, after some political struggles: according to the Guardian, socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo negotiated the exchange of some of its office space for childcare and cultural spaces. Its claim to being invisible, meanwhile, is also a key part of its appeal: despite housing a 120-room hotel, the glass casing and tapering top floors will supposedly allow it to blend into the sky around it. If anyone can pull it off, Herzog and de Meuron can.