NowParis

Architecture

Architecture in Paris

Paris keeps its skyline low and settles its architectural arguments in public, usually over a state commission. The results tend to be devices as much as buildings.

• Fondation Louis Vuitton

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  Completed 2014

  Frank Gehry

  A private art foundation at the edge of the Bois de Boulogne. Frank Gehry wrapped a group of gallery blocks in twelve curved glass sails, which carry no floors and enclose nothing. The galleries inside are plain rectangular rooms. The sails exist to give the building a silhouette against the park, which is the whole proposition.

• Bibliothèque nationale de France

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  Opened 1996

  Dominique Perrault

  The national library on the eastern edge of the city. Dominique Perrault set four glass towers at the corners of a raised deck, shaped like open books, and sank a forest into the middle of the block. The reading rooms face that courtyard, below street level and below the trees. The monument is the void, not the towers.

• Institut du Monde Arabe

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  Completed 1987

  Jean Nouvel

  An institute for Arab culture on the Left Bank. Jean Nouvel filled the south facade with metal apertures that open and close like camera irises, rebuilding a geometric screen as mechanism. Light in the galleries shifts through the day as they move. It made Nouvel's name by treating an ornamental tradition as an engineering problem.

• Centre Georges Pompidou

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  Completed 1977

  Renzo Piano · Richard Rogers

  A cultural centre in the Marais with its structure and services on the outside. Piano and Rogers moved ducts, escalators and bracing onto the facades to leave every floor clear and changeable, then colour-coded what they exposed. The escalator tube crosses the west front on a diagonal. It put a museum, a public library and a research institute inside one flexible frame, and gave half the site away as a square.

• Eiffel Tower

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  Completed 1889

  Gustave Eiffel

  A wrought iron tower built for the World's Fair. Eiffel's engineers shaped the curve of the legs from wind calculations rather than drawing, so the profile is the diagram of a force made visible. The lattice stays open enough to see sky through at every level. It was permitted on condition that it come down after twenty years, and survived because the antennas on top turned out to be useful.