Grande Arche also known as Grande Arche de la Fraternite, Arche de la Défense or simply as La Grande Arche is one of the famous monument and building in the business district of La Défense to the west of Paris, France. The Grande Arche is the europe’s largest district for business.Beyond the city limits Grande Arche extends from the Champs- Elysees to the Arc de Triomphe. This grand project by Mitterand , the French president was a 15 billion franc program. This triumphal arch is a 35 story office building. The area around La defense has office towers with 14 of France’s top 20 corporations.
History: French president Francois Mitterand launched an international design competition named ‘purity and strength’. he project to build the 'Grande Arche' (Great Arch) was initiated by the French president Mitterrand. He wanted a XXth century version of the Arc de Triomphe. La Grande Arche de La Défense was designed by Otto von Spreckelsen and It has a prestressed concrete frame covered with glass and Carrara marble from Italy and was built by the French civil engineering company Bouygues. The 'Grande Arche' Completed in 1989, The nearly-completed Arche was inaugurated in July 1989, with grand military parades to mark the bicentenary of the French Revolution.Design: Tt has been suggested that the structure looks like a four-dimensional hypercube (a tesseract) projected onto the three-dimensional world. The Arche is almost a perfect cube (width: 108m, height: 110m, depth: 112m). It has a pre-stressed concrete frame covered with glass and Carrara marble from Italy. Plan fills a 100 meter square with a tremendous squared arch, rising 110m. The Grande Arche is a huge marble and glass clad concrete monument weighing over 300,000 tons. Fabric canopy and transparent tube elevator under the huge square arch. Completed by Paul Andreau.
It completed the line of monuments that forms the Axe historique running through Paris. The Arche is turned at an angle of 6.33° on this axis however, a peculiarity which has been explained by several theories. In particular, the architect is said to have wanted to emphasise the depth of the monument, while the specific angle was chosen to create symmetry with the similarly-skewed Louvre at the other end of the Axe. However, it seems the most important reason was mundanely technical: with a métro station, an RER station, and a motorway all situated directly underneath the Arche, the angle was the only way to accommodate the structure's giant foundations.
Building Information: It is a 348 ft white building with the middle part left open. The two sides of the Arche house government offices. The roof section, exploited by Stephane Cherki, is an exhibition centre. La Défense is a modern business district on the outskirts of Paris with some 150,000 corporate employees, 20,000 residents, a huge shopping mall, and the world's largest public-transportation center.
Views From The Building: Take a thrilling ride up to the 35th floor in one of the four panoramic glass lifts to enjoy the superb view. There are also six different organised tours starting from here for a thorough exploration of the roof, the arch and the surrounding district of La Défense.
You can take an elevator to the top of the Arche de la Défense, from where you have a nice view on the city center which is only 4 km further.The roof has a panoramic viewpoint offering a magnificent vista of the historic axis extending from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre. In addition, the Arche is placed so that it forms a secondary axe (axis) with the two highest buildings in Paris, the Tour Eiffel and the Tour Montparnasse. Impressive views of Paris are to be had from the lifts taking visitors to the roof.It's worth a visit, if only to catch a glimpse of the modern France that you don't see on tourist postcards.
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