No new tall buildings will be allowed in Paris under a planning law that ends the French capital’s relatively brief flirtation with high-rise architecture, reports The Times.
The city council, led by Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor, will endorse a height limit of 37m for new construction across the capital as part of a long-term “bioclimatic” plan to cope with rising temperatures and a shortage of housing.
The new ceiling, imposed under pressure from Hidalgo’s Greens party partner, revives a 37m maximum that was imposed on the traditionally low-rise city in 1977 in response to anger over the Montparnasse tower, the 210m skyscraper that opened in the middle of the Left Bank in 1973.
The still-loathed 56-floor obelisk, second in height only to the 300m Eiffel tower, remains the city’s tallest building but more office and residential towers were erected at the same time around the edges of the compact city. Higher building began in the outer districts again after 2010 when Bertrand Delanoë, the previous mayor, raised the ceiling to 180m for office towers and 50m for residential buildings.
His aim was to end the idea of Paris, with its tight restrictions and historic conservation, as a “city museum” and open it up to the modernist creativity that was sweeping London and other cities.