Tour Montparnasse

Here is Tour Montparnasse, a horrible building in the 15th arrondisement and Paris's answer to Centre Point. It is 210-meters and built from 1969-72 and remains the tallest skyscraper in France, though there is some pressure by the height of Tour Axa (225 meters) being built now and eventually Tour Phare, Tour Signal and Tour Generali at a planned 300-meters. These latter projects on ice thanks to the meltdown. The 59 stories on top of Montparnasse-Bienvenue Paris Metro and across the street from busy Gare Montparnasse train station so easy to understand the rational for having a commercial slab here. Still, its simple architecture, gigantic proportions and monolithic appearance out of place in Paris pardieu and, as a result, two years after its completion the construction of skyscrapers in the city centre banned. And of course - l'asbestos! - and so there is. As of July 2007, Mont-P closed and empty for at least three years and maybe another five .. they should just bring it down. I once had a meeting on the second floor with some pension fund - what floor more demoralising?

My photo BTW taken across the street at Jardin Atlantique above the tracks of the Montparnasse train station, which itself an ugly failure of communal work-live space. I hate this part of Paris. We are here to visit Musee Jean Moulin which has a temporary expo on women's war-time fashion which Sonnet checks out ("professionally instructive; fascinating"). The museum otherwise about being in the French Resistance during WWII and how France saved the free-world. Hmmm.

Madeleine: "Can I watch WWW smack down?"