Paris rejects plans for pyramidal skyscraper: Tour Triangle
Paris city councillors voted against plans on Monday for French capital's first modern skyscraper in more than 40 years, the Tour Triangle.
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Paris rejected plans on Monday for a 43-storey triangular-shaped building, leaving the Eiffel Tower to reign supreme over the Paris skyline for now.
But Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo declared the vote null and void because some opponent of the project displayed their ballots in defiance of a decision to make the vote secret.
"The law has not been respected," she said and asked for a court ruling on whether the vote stands.
On Tuesday Hidalgo sought consensus through amendments arguing that the negative vote mostly resulted because of a political coalition of Green, right-wing, centre and hard-left parties against the Socialist group.
The 180-metre high Tour Triangle was supposed to go up in south-western Paris by 2017.
The project would have created 5,000 jobs and cost 535 million euros.
Paris has imposed a maximum height limit of 37 metres since the building of the controversial Tour Montparnasse in the 70s.
But in 2010 the rules changed and the city allowed blocks up to 50 metres and offices of 180 in areas near the ring road.
In 2013 the Tour Triangle was approved to be built in the Parc des Expositions.
Opposition has won support from such unexpected quarters as Norman Foster, the British architect behind London's "Gherkin" skyscraper.
The UN's cultural arm, ,Unesco also warned that it could threaten the landscape of "one of the few remaining horizontal cities".
"Paris is no more horizontal than any other European capital," French architect Jean Nouvel told France Inter radio on Tuesday.
The Tour Triangle is a "magnificient building [...] One of the most incredible sculptural things I have ever seen," Novel said.
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