When it was completed in 1973, Paris’s Tour Montparnasse, or Montparnasse Tower, was the tallest building in France. It was also the most reviled, “Almost universally disdained for its hulking presence and incongruous scale,” according to Metropolis Magazine. As France rebuilt after World War II, civic leaders wanted to transform Montparnasse from a slum into a vibrant business district, with the 59-story chocolate-brown skyscraper designed by Eugène Beaudouin, Urbain Cassan, and Louis Hoym de Marien at its center.
French President Georges Pompidou approved the plans in 1969 and the project was completed four years later. But in a city defined by six-story cut-stone apartment buildings from the 19th century, the glass-and-steel monolith stuck out like a 690-foot sore thumb. (The longstanding joke has been that the tower has the best view in Paris because it’s the only place from which you can’t see it.)
Just four years after Tour Montparnasse was completed, Paris banned buildings over seven stories tall from the city center, forcing high rises to the outskirts. After large-scale renovations to Tour First in La Défense, Montparnasse Tower was dethroned as the city’s tallest building in 2011. (It remains the tallest building in Paris proper, however.)
Though the passage of time has softened Parisians’ views of other controversial structures—including the Eiffel Tower, Louvre Pyramid, and Centre Pompidou—opprobrium for this modernist superstructure endures. In 2014, mayoral candidate Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet called it “an urban catastrophe” and proposed tearing it down. Of course, not everyone loathes the Montparnasse Tower: French daredevil Alain Robert scaled it twice, in 1995 and 2015.
And there have been plenty of high profile tenants over the years, including presidents François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, and Emmanuel Macron. There are also the throngs of tourists who flock to the rooftop terrace for unparalleled views of the City of Light. Superstar architect Daniel Libeskind has also defended the building or, rather, “the idea it represents.”
“Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city,” Libeskind wrote in a 2017 piece in The New York Times Magazine. “Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be.”