PARIS | Full Summary of Projects

[New Brisavoine]

Picture of the Louis Vuitton Foundation taken by Kony last Thursday.

[New Brisavoine]

The new roof of the Quai Branly Museum in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel Tower, features an Australian Aboriginal artwork that is only visible from the air (or from the Eiffel Tower) titled "Barramundi Scales", by Lena Nyadbi, and Aboriginal woman living in a remote area 1,000 km (620 miles) from Darwin. "Barramundi Scales" is a giant pattern of barramundi fish scales related to an Aboriginal myth about the creation of diamonds.


AFP-JIJI


Source


Cyril Zannettacci/Musée du Quai Branly

[New Brisavoine]

Pictures of Tour Majunga U/C at La Défense taken by Cochise75 today.

[mousquet]

Here's a brand new education facility in the Clichy-Batignolles area of the 17th arrondissment currently redeveloped. Of course, they are boasting how green it can be, seemingly involving some cool engineering: vegetalized walls and roofs (some kind of both efficient and green insulation), photovoltaic panels for power supply, upscale thermal insulation and soundproofing, generous sized double glazed windows for views over the neighboring little park, "ground-coupled heat exchanger" and "automated vacuum waste collection system" for the 12 classrooms of the nursery and elementary school and the 152 student housing studios/apartments in there. There will also be some central kitchens to cook the meals of several schools of the 17th arrondissement. I like it, looks interesting. Below, some pictures show some rather stripped interiors though, because it's brand new. No doubt kids and college teens living in there will bring some stuff and funny mess to it.























































http://www.paris.fr/accueil/accueil-...479_port_24329

https://plus.google.com/photos/10543...44959477901031

That's fine. If all nursery/elementary schools were this fine in the country, we'd be the most advanced nation on earth.

[mousquet]

This is a small masterplan (4 ha/10 acres) called Alstom Confluence in Saint-Denis.

Originally Posted by lemoniteur.fr

http://www.lemoniteur.fr/133-amenage...ion-culturelle

WARNING, totalitarian rule alert: Saint-Denis is a suburb of the "Ceinture Rouge" (the red belt), ruled by the French Communist Party since 1930. In other words, I fear too much of the still too often bland and mediocre social housing they build for the social class they mercilessly keep proletarianized and use for their political interests.

However, the little area covered by the masterplan should be mixed use, so there might be quite a bit of business and middle class in there. Also, the article of lemoniteur.fr is advertising the presence of an art community working in a building formerly occupied by Alstom. So coming inhabitants will locally have an easy access to culture and design like graphic arts, photography and media communication, fashion design, music and dance that all will be active within the future local community.

The whole thing will be developed in 3 phases and should be complete by the end of 2017. They started the work on phase 1 already. In all, 750 housing units are planned, that is 60,000 m² (roughly 650,000 sq ft) of housing.

[New Brisavoine]

My yearly photo update of La Défense. Enjoy!

Evolution over 6 years:





Evolution over 1 year:



Close-up views:

[easy as pie]

man, the lv museum is so so sick.

[New Brisavoine]

Article published in BusinessWeek last week:

Paris Set to Outdo London Shard With Russian Skyscrapers

BusinessWeek
September 16, 2013


The Foster+Partners-designed French complex -- to be named The Hermitage Plaza -- will have towers of 85 and 86 floors and is slated to be completed by early 2019.

Russian developer Hermitage has a project for Paris that would outdo London.

It’s planning a complex costing about 3 billion euros ($4 billion) on Paris’s outskirts to elbow out the London Shard from its spot as western Europe’s tallest skyscraper. The project with two 320 meter-high (1,050 feet) towers in the La Defense business district, 11 metro stops from the Notre-Dame cathedral, will house luxury apartments, offices and a five-star hotel. The structures would surpass the 310 meter-tall London Shard. In the French capital, only the Eiffel Tower will be taller.

“You’ll be able to see the buildings from every part of the city,” Emin Iskenderov, 37, the Russian chief executive officer of Hermitage, said in a Sept. 12 interview in his Paris office. “We hope before the end of this year we’re going to finalize the financial agreements, and we’re going to start the project this year.”

The conception of the buildings, France’s first skyscrapers to combine offices, apartments and a hotel, coincides with dropping housing prices and office rents in the country. The French economy will barely expand for the second year in 2013 amid Europe’s financial woes, and as Socialist President Francois Hollande and his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy raised the tax burden to a record to trim the budget deficit.

“In a difficult period, it’s not an obvious project to develop,” Olivier Gerard, the head of commercial real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield France, said in a Sept. 10 interview. A multipurpose tower “is a very difficult building to develop because of security issues and different flows of persons within the building,” he said.

[...]

Iskenderov is undeterred, pointing to the success of the mixed model in Asia and the Middle East. So-called mixed-use buildings have been thriving in China, the U.S. and Dubai, home to the world’s tallest skyscraper, the 828-meter high Burj Khalifa building, according to Skyscraperpage.com.

Alexander Kraft, Chairman and CEO of Sotheby’s International Realty for France & Monaco, said Iskenderov may be right.

“They really plan to have services that you don’t get anywhere else today in Paris,” he said in an interview yesterday. “Owners will have all access to the luxury hotel services, maid service, room service, etc. If all this becomes true, I think there can and probably will be a new market for it, but it has to be done right. You will have incredible views over all of Paris.”

[...]

“In my view, this project is really targeted almost 100 percent toward foreign buyers, first-time buyers who really want to have peace of mind, who don’t want to renovate in Paris, who don’t want to be bothered with maintenance and upkeep, and who are really looking for all the services they have in Hong-Kong, Moscow, Tokyo, etc,” said Sotheby’s Kraft.

[...]

“The Paris market is very poor for luxury apartments,” Iskenderov said. “When you see the London market, the New York market, the Miami market, you have a lot of choice.”

http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...yscrapers-plan

And the best quote for the end:

"If Paris can pull this project off, these skyscrapers will become the face of modern France."

See the video: http://www.businessweek.com/videos/2...-2-skyscrapers

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by mousquet

Cool picture. I have indicated some famous buildings/locations, with their distance from the photographer.

[vonbingen_cezar]

inauguration this week in the largest shopping mall of continental europe.
LES QUATRE TEMPS. district LA DEFENSE. PARIS.

inauguration of the largest indoor digital display system named DIGITAL DREAM by unibail.

surface : 2700 square ft / 250 square meters.


picture by oohtv.fr

[vonbingen_cezar]

re-opening of the shopping mall ITALIE 2. PARIS 13th.
since september 12, 2013.
the mall ITALIE 2 is now refurbished a great realization













pictures italie 2 facebook.

The transformation is radical impressive,
an old almost dilapidated shopping mall became a magnificent really modern beautiful center.

[mousquet]

The Carpe Diem thread is closed yet? Bon, some views of the foot connecting the slab to the ring boulevard.







This is where the stairway comes to from the boulevard, up to that spot of la Défense's slab which may be the largest concrete slab (i.e. an artificial pedestrian ground, cars going underneath) in the world, I think.



Pictures by Maza for pss-archi.eu

The importance of these easier slab/boulevard connections (now obligatory to every project) can't be underestimated. It's just too bad there's no significant retail space on 1st floors yet.

[AJphx]

great update! some very impressive designs

[Muji]

Whoa, the Italie 2 remodel is impressive. I don't exactly love the new look, but it's an enormous improvement over the sad mall that I remember from 2009.

[DanielG425]

Question, what are those 3 or 4 recently added tubes under the Eiffel?! I can't find the answer anywhere! Example. http://www.google.com/imgres?client=...iw=320&bih=372

[mousquet]

^ I don't know, but it looks like there's been some temporary events and related fitting out on the 1st floor this summer (an exhibition space and a restaurant), so this may be some maintenance tubes. It's definitely temporary anyway.

[Minato Ku]

It is for the construction of new structures in the first floor of the Eiffel tower.
Those will be removed when the work will be over.

[Minato Ku]

Aeroville shopping mall.

Paris airport gets new €355m shopping complex

Ben McPartland | 17 Oct 2013, 15:09

Aeroville, a brand new mega shopping centre at Charles de Gaulle airport opened its doors for the first time on Thursday. It took eight years and €355 million to build - and the good news is it's open on Sundays.
If you are not happy with the quality of duty free shopping at Charles de Gaulle airport, you now have a brand spanking new alternative place to pick up last minute presents for family and friends before you fly off from Paris. Although you'll have to get the airport a little earlier of course.

The €355 million Aeroville, which was inaugurated on Wednesday, has been a long time coming – eight years in fact but Unibail-Radamco, the owners of Aeroville are hoping it will be all be worth the wait.

They describe it as “the biggest shopping centre to open in the Paris region of Ile-de-France in 20 years”.

The centre has space for 200 boutiques, 98 percent of which are already occupied and if you walk around the whole centre you will cover a distance of 1.2 kilometres.

There are also 30 restaurants in the centre with indoor terraces, which is in stark contrast to few dining options available at Charles de Gaulle airport itself

Aeroville is designed to entice those who travel to Paris on business and spend one or two nights in hotels near the airport as well as the 120,000 people who work in various capacities at Charles de Gaulle.

It is also hoped the hundreds of thousands of people from France and abroad who visit the trade shows at nearby Villepinte each year will also be attracted in to Aeroville. There’s also the 1.8 million residents who live within a 30 minute drive of the centre who should help to pay backthe €355 million bill.

Another important factor that will help bring in the euros is that because the centre is built in the airport zone it will be able to open on Sunday’s without breaking the law.

This will no doubt cause anger among the French workers who recently protested, demanding the right to be able to open on Sundays.

There’s also a huge cinema complex, so missing a late night flight, might not be so bad in future. The cinema is operated by French director Luc Besson’s EuropaCorp company and includes 12 screens and a restaurant.

Aeroville is open from 10am to 8pm everyday of the week.

http://m.thelocal.fr/20131017/new-35...-paris-airport

The article is a mit misleading, while the mall is in the airport area, it is quite far of the terminals.
Aeroville is 84,000 sq meters big.
The mall opened today.

My pictures.

[New Brisavoine]

There was a long article in the New York Times today written by the departing NYT correspondent in Paris:

Reflections on a Paris Left Behind

By STEVEN ERLANGER
New York Times
October 18, 2013

Even Hemingway struggled with this city, working on a memoir of his poor early days, “A Moveable Feast,” off and on for years, before it was finally published after his death. Christopher Hitchens once called it “an ur-text of the American enthrallment with Paris,” identifying an unthinking nostalgia “as we contemplate a Left Bank that has since become a banal tourist enclave in a Paris where the tough and plebeian districts are gone, to be replaced by seething Muslim banlieues all around the periphery.”

[...]

http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/10/20...hind.html?_r=0

For some reason my comment to the article was not approved by the New York Times. Go figure... So here it is:

Originally Posted by Brisavoine

Mr Erlanger seems to contradict himself. On the hand he regrets the disappearance of the "louche" life and the fact that Paris has become an antiseptic city catering only to the "careful pleasures" of the well-to-do, yet on the other hand he complains that Paris is filthy, littered with dog excrement, and full of "gangs of Muslims, Africans and Jews", not to mention "Roma male prostitutes". Make up your mind Mr Erlanger! It can't be both.

The article also feels like it's been written by someone who has rarely ventured beyond the Périphérique, which the author refers to as "a kind of Berlin Wall", a comparison that I think tells more about the author than about the city. Millions of Parisians cross that "Berlin Wall" everyday (from the suburbs to Central Paris, but also from Central Paris to the suburbs, where an ever larger number of jobs are located, for example at La Défense, in St Denis, Issy, Levallois, etc.). The article fails to give us a sense of that vibrant metropolis, the Grand Paris, that has become the true playground for the Parisians today (Hemingway was 90 years ago for Christ's sake!), and lingers too much on the nostalgic quaint central arrondissements of yesteryear (the 10 central arrondissements where a lot of American expats tend to spend most of their expat lives).

Apparently, a liberal news outlet like the New York Times can't stand criticism.

[easy as pie]

yeah, i'm sort of with this guy and against him. like the louche life is pretty much me, like i've lived in the 18th (poteau, near jules joffrin metro) and the 10th (jarry, off the faubourg saint denis), both pretty 'popular' neighborhoods, and if i ever buy a flat in paris, it'd definitely be somewhere similar (shadier part of oberkampf, barbes, clichy, etc). but even then, compared with berlin or even london, paris is sort of dead. like there's almost nothing to do beyond the periferique, but the number of interesting hoods and cafes and things is fast diminishing in the face of insane real estate speculation and a bourgeoisisation that hasn't been seen since the era of haussmann. and the annoyance of the roving suburban teens (which, unfortunately, is pretty much synonymous with certain racial/ethnic groups) is real. they're ugly and dangerous (i've been robbed twice, and my cousin and i got jumped by a gang, though we somehow managed to beat up all four of them, hehe). i think the nostalgia for a time (the 1980s? i was born then, so i don't even know) when you could live just off the mouffetard for like 500/month and people screened films in their buildings' basements and shop prices were fluid and noone seemed to work, i think that's a pretty reasonable thing to want back. sf, nyc, paris, london, we're going through a tough phase right now, the cities are very uncool.