It has two names: the Triangle tower and the Toblerone tower (because its shape resembles the triangular chunks of the Swiss chocolate bar.) But whatever you call it, most Parisians don’t want it, especially those living in the 15th arrondissement near the Porte de Versailles. Funnily enough, the architecture firm that designed the tower is Swiss.

An investment of 700 million euros, the tower will be 42 floors high and will house a four-star hotel, offices, shared workspace (“coworking”), a health center and cultural space, street-level shops and a panoramic restaurant on the top floor. It will be the first tall building built in the city of Paris since the 1973 Tour Montparnasse.

Those against the project state the following reasons – Visual pollution, not ecological, a traffic nightmare, it will destroy the harmony of the neighborhood, an environmental disaster and “We’re not New York”.

From WIKI – Critics of the Tour Triangle opposed the project because of its controversial height. The 42-story project is to be the first skyscraper to be built in low-rise Paris in approximately 40 years since the construction of the Tour Montparnasse, the scale of the latter which still provokes animosity amongst Parisians.

It’s true. Low-rise Paris is not high-rise Manhattan. This is why La Défense – Europe’s largest business district with 72 modern buildings and skyscrapers in which a quarter of a million people work everyday (I am one of those workers) – was conscientiously constructed in its own “park” in the west end of the city.

To see the high office buildings and green spaces of La Défense, read the blog post below that I wrote exactly 3 years ago in July 2019. Back then, we were blissfully unaware of a disease called Covid. If someone had told the people in the blog photos that in exactly one year a global pandemic will cause more than eight million cases of infection and approximately 450,000 deaths worldwide by July 2020 alone, they’d look at you in astonishment. But that’s what happened.

food trucks at La Défense