Grande Arche de la Défense

La Grande Arche is a huge hollow cube in the La Défense business district, just west of Paris, France. It is about 110 metres wide, high and deep, and it is part of a long line of monuments that starts at the Louvre and runs through the Arc de Triomphe, which is about 4 kilometres away. It was one of the Grands Projets, the big building projects of President François Mitterrand.

It was designed as a late-20th-century version of the Arc de Triomphe, but dedicated to humanity and humanitarian ideals rather than to military victories. It was inaugurated in July 1989, with grand military parades marking 200 years since the French Revolution. Its first name was La Grande Arche de la Fraternité, meaning the Great Arch of Fraternity.

Design and construction

President Mitterrand launched a national design competition in 1982. The winning entry came from the Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen and the Danish engineer Erik Reitzel. Construction began in 1985, mostly by the French company Bouygues. Spreckelsen resigned in July 1986, and Paul Andreu took over the architecture, while Reitzel continued until completion in 1989.

A cube from another dimension

Reitzel said the arch was designed to look like a three-dimensional shadow of a tesseract, which is the four-dimensional cousin of a cube. It has a frame of prestressed concrete covered in glass and stone. Inside the opening hang glass lift shafts and a fabric sunshade called the "Cloud".

The marble tiles that first covered it soaked up rainwater, froze and began to peel, so they were replaced with granite.

A tilted arch

The arch is turned at an angle of 6.33 degrees. The main reason was technical: a metro and train station and a motorway run right under it, and the angle was the only way to fit its giant foundations. The turn also lines it up with the Eiffel Tower and Tour Montparnasse.

The two sides hold government offices. The roof was closed in 2010 for repairs and reopened in 2017 with panoramic views of Paris, a restaurant and an exhibition area on photojournalism.

On the globe

The model shows the giant white cube with a square opening and the cloud-like canopy inside; look for the big hollow cube.