John Pardey on Johan Otto von Spreckelsen’s La Grande Arche in Paris (1989) – a monumental, yet elegant building laced with symbolism that was part of President Mitterand’s Grands Projets.
This article is part of a monthly series of short essays on some of the greatest buildings of the 20th Century. Read John Pardey’s introduction to the series here.
A modernised Arch de Triomphe, but as a monument to humanity rather than military victories”
— Johan Otto von Spreckelsen
In Paris at the end of the 20th century, a new programme of civic works was undertaken by President François Mitterrand following the success of his predecessor, Valéry d’Estaing and his project for the Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.
Mitterrand’s Grands Projets were to include the reimagining of the Louvre by I.M. Pei, the Bibliothèque national by Dominique Perrault, the Opera Bastille by Carlos Ott, Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, Nouvel’s Arab World Institute – and Johan Otto von Spreckelsen’s Grande Arche, among others.
Spreckelsen may not be a household name, yet his Grande Arche in Paris is world renowned. In his own words, he was “an architect who built four churches and one arche.”
Between 1960 and 1981 he did indeed build four churches – and each is a little gem. Each church is distinctive, using primary geometries in plan (one being triangle and three being squares) and exposed brick that clearly owe a debt to the work of Louis Kahn.
Born in 1929 just as Corbusier was completing his seminal Villa Savoye, Spreckelsen, a Dane, graduated from the Royal Academy of Arts in Copenhagen where he became a professor and later, Director. Like Utzon with his Sydney Opera House, the competition for a new landmark building in a major city was to prove to be a pyrrhic victory that he was to incur a huge personal cost – and he too never saw the finished building.
Paris is a city laid out along political lines with Napoleon III’s urban planning system masterminded by Georges-Eugène Haussmann from 1853 that saw medieval neighbourhoods demolished and wide avenues, squares and parks superimposed upon the city. This radical surgery not only caused major upheavals and resistance from the poorer denizens of the city, but also eased congestion for wagons, horses and carts – also allowing the military to quickly mobilise and move in on any civil uprisings. One of the main new axes – or rather, boulevards – strikes a straight line from the Place de la Concorde, north-westwards through the Arc de Triomphe across the Seine, to the new business district of Paris called La Défense.
Initiated in the early 50s, La Défense was to become the equivalent of London’s Canary Wharf: a cluster of tall office buildings on the edge of the city centre. City authorities had employed I.M. Pei to design a landmark building to terminate the axis from the Arc de Triomphe in the ‘70s and his design was a pair of towers, connected by an inverted ‘U’ shaped form; naturally, like all landmark buildings, it was given the nickname of ‘The Tuning Fork’. Other schemes were to follow, until the global recession in the latter part of the decade halted major building works.
But Paris was to bounce back. In 1982, a competition for a new international communications centre was announced, calling for a building “to bring to the business quarter the cultural dimension and the animation necessary to its completion” and mark the anniversary of the French Revolution.
In total, 424 entries were received and on 25th May, 1983, Speckelsen’s singular design was announced as the unanimous winner, even despite the fact that the competition brief imposed a maximum height of 35 metres and his design was 100 metres high. Speckelsen’s design was hugely well received, being described as, “the project appears remarkable by its purity, by the force with which it gives another offshoot to Paris’s historical axis, and by its openness.” Again, like Utzon before him, he was away when the call came to inform him of his win, and it was days before he returned from holiday to hear the news.
Spreckelsen’s masterstroke was to conceive of a 100-metre hollow cube in glistening marble – so simple in form it could have been a child’s toy. This form was given elegance by chamfering the internal returns of the sides and top by 45 degrees, in turn presenting a sharp edge to the front and rear of the arche. The base of this cube sat on the ground, so the chamfered return became a grand staircase that led up to the open public square. To the grand axis it became an arch, large enough to enclose Notre Dame Cathedral – to Spreckelsen, it was an open door to the north of Paris and beyond.
French law meant that this relatively unknown architect had to team up with the French practice of Paul Andreau, who had built the Roissy airport. Inevitably, tensions were to quickly raise in setting an academic and visionary architect against a commercial practice (today commonly referred to as an ‘executive architect’).
Within the arch, hovering above the podium, a Teflon canopy floats like a cloud and a steel cage rises up to the roof supporting glass lifts.
(Credit: Coldcreation via Wikipedia Commons)
And while La Grande Arche appeared rudimentary in form, such simplicity demanded complexity in detail and delivery. The site was already occupied by a metro station and motorway, so the building was offset by 6.35 degrees and needed co-ordination of a 300,000-tonne concrete structure; 80,000 square feet of office space for different users; 37 floors above ground, five below; three hectares of marble facades and ground-breaking panoramic lifts that glided up thin steel rails.
The concrete structure designed by engineer Erik Reitzel, was stupendous – six foundation piles each side of the arche (each pile able to take the weight of four Eiffel Towers) supporting the floor slabs each side. Every seventh floor is a service floor, while the roof beams, 70 meters long, 9.5 meters tall and weighing 2000 tons each, mean that structurally, the entire building could in theory be flipped sideways or upside down and still stand – just like a child’s toy.
Once appointed, Spreckelsen endured several years of a painful back and forth in process and politics — and as an academic, was unable to compromise to the levels the process demanded, something that culminated in his resignation in July 1986 – just as had happened on Utzon’s Opera House. But Spreckelsen’s vision of a pristine white hollow cube prevailed through all the painful birth of this monumental building. He died the following year without ever seeing his masterpiece completed.
It is hard to think of a commercial building that that really exceeds its typology to become true architecture – perhaps Wright’s Larkin Building from 1906, Mies’s Seagram Building of 1958, Rogers’ Lloyds of London – and the Grande Arche, the latter not only hinting at a symbolic meaning, but succeeding in being simple, yet profound.
Source: Architecture Today
