La
Grande Arche de la Défense is a monument and building in the business district
of La Défense and in the commune of Puteaux, to the west of Paris, France. It
is usually known as the Arche de la Défense or simply as La Grande Arche. A
110-metre-high (360 ft) cube, La Grande Arche is part of the perspective from
the Louvre to Arc de Triomphe. The distance from La Grande Arche to Arc de Triomphe
is 4 km (2 1⁄2 miles).
Design and construction
A
great national design competition was launched in 1982 as the initiative of
French president François Mitterrand. Danish architect Johan Otto von
Spreckelsen (1929–1987) and Danish engineer Erik Reitzel (1941-2012) designed
the winning entry to be a late-20th-century version of the Arc de Triomphe: a
monument to humanity and humanitarian ideals rather than military victories.
The construction of the monument began in 1985. Spreckelsen resigned in July
1986 and ratified the transfer of all his architectural responsibilities to his
associate, French architect Paul Andreu. Reitzel continued his work until the
monument was completed in 1989.
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| From the courtyard of La Grande Arche de Defense, in the distance, two miles to the east, down a classic Paris tree-lined avenue is the famed Arc de Triomphe |
The
Arche is in the approximate shape of a cube with a width, height and depth of
110 m (360 ft); it has been suggested that the structure looks like a hypercube
(a tesseract) projected onto the three-dimensional world. It has a prestressed
concrete frame covered with glass and Carrara marble from Italy and was built
by the French civil engineering company Bouygues.
La
Grande Arche was inaugurated in July 1989, with grand military parades that
marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution. It completed the line of
monuments that forms the Axe historique running through Paris. The Arche is
turned at an angle of 6.33° about the vertical axis. The most important reason
for this turn was technical: with a métro station, an RER station, and a
motorway all situated directly underneath the Arche, the angle was the only way
to accommodate the structure's giant foundations. In addition, from an
architectural point of view, the turn emphasizes the depth of the monument and
is similar to the turn of the Louvre at the other end of the Axe historique.
Grande Arche at night
In
addition, the Arche is placed so that it forms a secondary axis with the two of
the highest buildings in Paris at the time, the Tour Eiffel and the Tour
Montparnasse.
The
two sides of the Arche house government offices. The roof section was closed in
2010 following an accident without injury and opened again to the public in
2017 after seven years of renovation works. It features panoramic views of
Paris and includes a restaurant and an exhibition area dedicated to
photojournalism.—Wikipedia.
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| Christmas at La Grande Arche |
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