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Tour Sans Fins
The Tour Sans Fins (“Endless Tower”) was a tower planned in La Défense that has since been cancelled. The spelling ''Tour Sans Fins'' may, to a native French-speaker, sound like a grammatical mistake as it would normally be written ''Tour Sans Fin'' without the ‘s’ at the end of ''fins''. However, the idea was that this tower had no ends, even if one looked up or down at it, hence “ends” and not “end”. History The history of the Tour Sans Fins is linked to the early projects for La Défense. The Grande Arche was built in an area that was not yet developed. As a testimony to the lack of completed construction in La Défense, the winning design was selected next to an outdoor parking lot of the RER The winner of this contest was Jean Nouvel, and his Tour Sans Fins was meant to be 425m tall and would have been the tallest skyscraper in Europe. Technical reasons in addition to the early 1990s recession The early 1990s recession describes the period of economic down ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Courbevoie
Courbevoie () is a Communes of France, commune located in the Hauts-de-Seine department of the Île-de-France region of France. It is a suburb of Paris, from the Kilometre zero, center of Paris. The centre of Courbevoie is situated from the city limits of Paris. La Défense, a business district hosting the List of tallest buildings and structures in the Paris region, tallest buildings in the Paris metropolitan area, spreads over the southern part of Courbevoie (as well as parts of Puteaux, Nanterre and La Garenne-Colombes). Name The name Courbevoie comes from Latin ''Curva Via'' and means "curved highway", allegedly in reference to a Roman road from Paris to Normandy that made a sharp turn to climb the hill over which Courbevoie was built. Administration Courbevoie is divided into two canton in France, cantons: Canton of Courbevoie-1 and Canton of Courbevoie-2. History A wooden bridge was built crossing the Seine at Courbevoie by order of Henry IV of France, King Henry IV w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hauts-de-Seine
Hauts-de-Seine (; ) is a department in the Île-de-France region of France. It covers Paris's western inner suburbs. It is bordered by Paris, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne to the east, Val-d'Oise to the north, Yvelines to the west and Essonne to the south. With a population of 1,624,357 (as of 2019)Populations légales 2019: 92 Hauts-de-Seine INSEE and a total area of 176 square kilometres (68 square miles), it has the second highest among all departments of France, after Paris. It is the [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jean Nouvel
Jean Nouvel (; born 12 August 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of ''Mars 1976'' and ''Syndicat de l'Architecture'', France’s first labor union for architects. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008. A number of museums and architectural centres have presented retrospectives of his work. Family and education Nouvel was born on 12 August 1945 in Fumel, France. He is the son of Renée and Roger Nouvel, who were teachers. When his father became the county's chief school superintendent, his family moved often. His parents encouraged Nouvel to study mathematics and language but when he was 16 years old he was captivated by art when a teacher taught him drawing. Although he later said he thought that hi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Défense
La Défense () is a major business district in France's Paris metropolitan area, west of the city limits. It is located in Île-de-France region's Departments of France, department of Hauts-de-Seine in the Communes of France, communes of Courbevoie, La Garenne-Colombes, Nanterre, and Puteaux. La Défense is Europe's largest purpose-built business district, covering , for 180,000 daily workers, with 72 glass and steel buildings (of which 20 are completed skyscrapers, out of 24 in the Paris region), and of office space. Around its Grande Arche and Parvis de la Défense, esplanade ("le Parvis"), La Défense contains many of the Paris Paris aire urbaine, urban area's List of tallest buildings in France, tallest high-rises. Les Quatre Temps, Westfield Les Quatre Temps, a large shopping mall in La Défense, has 220 stores, 48 restaurants and a 24-screen movie theatre. Paris La Défense Arena, the largest indoor arena in Europe, was inaugurated in 2017. The district is located at th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grande Arche
La Grande Arche de la Défense (; "The Great Arch of the Defense"), originally called La Grande Arche de la Fraternité (; "Fraternity"), 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 cube, La Grande Arche is part of the perspective from the Louvre to Arc de Triomphe, and was one of the Grands Projets of François Mitterrand. The distance from La Grande Arche to Arc de Triomphe is . Design and construction A great national Architectural design competition, design competition was launched in 1982 as the initiative of French president François Mitterrand. Denmark, 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 vict ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Réseau Express Régional
The (; ), commonly abbreviated RER (), is a hybrid commuter rail and rapid transit system serving Paris and its suburbs. It acts as a combined city-center underground rail system and suburbs-to-city-center commuter rail, similar to the Elizabeth line in London, S-Bahn in German-speaking countries and the S Lines in Milan. Conceived of as a ('express metro') during the mid-1930s, the scheme was revived in the 1950s and construction began in the early 1960s. The RER was not fully conceptualised until the completion of the (roughly: 'master plan for urban development') in 1965. The RER network, which initially comprised two lines, was formally inaugurated on 8 December 1977 in a ceremony that was attended by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. A second phase of construction commenced at the end of the 1970s which saw additional lines constructed along with extensions to the original two. The RER is operated partly by RATP, the authority that operates most of the public tran ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Early 1990s Recession
The early 1990s recession describes the period of economic downturn affecting much of the Western world in the early 1990s. The impacts of the recession contributed in part to the 1992 U.S. presidential election victory of Bill Clinton over incumbent president George H. W. Bush. The recession also included the resignation of Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, the reduction of active companies by 15% and unemployment up to nearly 20% in Finland, civil disturbances in the United Kingdom and the growth of discount stores in the United States and beyond. Primary factors believed to have led to the recession include the following: restrictive monetary policy enacted by central banks, primarily in response to inflation concerns, the loss of consumer and business confidence as a result of the 1990 oil price shock, the end of the Cold War and the subsequent decrease in defense spending, the savings and loan crisis and a slump in office construction resulting from overbuilding duri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
