Parisians bring anti-skyscraper message to Hong Kong in Le French May show about beauty of city’s rooftops

As tall office towers begin to sprout around Paris, group lobbying for Unesco heritage status for skyline of French capital’s historic centre mount exhibition highlighting the romance of city’s rooftops

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The Montparnasse tour, in the distance on the left, and the Eiffel Tower, to the right, are among only a handful of Parisian structures to rise above seven storeys. Photo: Alamy

Published: 5:00pm, 4 Apr 2017Updated: 3:11pm, 7 Apr 2017

Le French May is bringing an exhibition to Hong Kong at the end of May that sounds like the usual evocation of romantic Paris. In fact, the show, called “Paris, Toits Emois” (The Roofs of Paris), wades into the touchy subject of whether the City of Light should be protected from the invasion of more high-rise developments.

Paris developed architectural acrophobia in 1973 with the completion of the 56-storey Montparnasse Tower. Parisians were so appalled by the incongruous, brown obelisk sticking out above the mass of low-rise, zinc-roofed buildings surrounding it that no skyscraper was allowed to be built near the city centre for the next 40 years. (They were still allowed in La Défense, the shiny, purpose-built business district safely tucked away to the west of central Paris.)

The Paris skyline is largely unchanged since this photo, “Les Amoureux de la Bastille”, by Willy Ronis, was taken in 1957. Photo: Willy Ronis Mediatheque

But attitudes are slowly changing, along with the city’s remarkably well preserved skyline.

Just four visual landmarks used to stand out from the unobstructed viewpoint at the top of the Centre Pompidou: the 210-metre Montparnasse Tower, still an uncompromising silhouette on the left, the Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame de Paris and the Basilica du Sacré-Coeur in Montmartre.

But now there’s a fifth. The soon-to-be-completed Paris Courthouse, the largest law court complex in Europe, designed by Renzo Piano, is a playful, 160-metre high stack of cubes that was approved in 2010 because the city relaxed a seven-storey height restriction. Office towers can now be as high as 180 metres.