La Défense

Okay, first up, let's hear from Rachel Koster.

Business people in France have been arriving earlier to work than ever before since the implementation of new technology in a parking garage in Paris' La Defense financial district.

As part of the parking garage's latest renovation, they got rid of all the stairs and added a bunch of fun slides.

Employers at Société Générale remarked that their bankers have never shown up so early for work or with so much static electricity in their hair.

Oui, oui, ben, ça, ça peut aussi les renforcer.

Il y a quand même un avantage à la défense a priori là-dedans, c'est que les modèles, ils sont mis à disposition un peu en amont à, à la défense.

Comme le nucléaire.

Alors, tu vois, oui.

Irremplaçable

...incontournable, ultra-consommatoire, etc.

Si vous êtes trois ingénieurs en casque jaune euh, à La Défense à vous servir de ça, bah ça va, ça va pas faire péter la planète, tu vois.

Mais là, tu vois, je serais curieux de savoir la population parce que y a deux ans, moi, je me demandais : « Mais qui irait payer un abonnement pour avoir accès à un chatbot qui est pas, qui sait pas compter le nombre de R dans strawberry ? »

Of course, my Australian lingo is going to butcher all of that, but I encourage you to check out the link in the show notes and you'll be able to read it a lot better than it sounds me saying it out loud.

Amongst these projects were the Louvre Pyramid, the Mousse d'Orsay, Opera de Bastille and Le Grand Arche de la Défense, the building of which is the subject of Stéphane Demostier's partially fictional film The Great Arch, which is once again out in Australian cinemas tomorrow.

This following interview was recorded ahead of the film's release and sees Nadine talking with the director about the film.

bit about The Curb.

I just would say one thing about the art, the time shows how great was the idea of Spreckelsen.

Because the fact to put a cube that is open in this perspective from the Louvre through the Arc de Triomphe to the west part of Paris and the suburb, the fact to put a cube that is open was really A very simple but very great idea.

And with the time, with the suburb developing itself behind La Défense, you can see how powerful that was.

Yes, yes.

Allting har ju sina nedsidor.

Men den ena platsen är då La Défense.

Gigantisk miljö, en jätteoffentlig miljö.

Fransmännen bygger ju för att bara sluka människan.

Och

här

ska man ställa om La Défense till...

A fairly abstract public environment with a lot of CBD, office complex businesses, also a lot of bottom floors, trade and commerce, to make it liveable.

You're listening to The Screenshot with me, Jason Derosso, brought to you by ABC Radio National.

Do you remember the brutalist Brady Corbett's 2024 prestige drama starring Adrian Brody about a Jewish émigré modernist architect? That very ambitious film came to mind this week as I watched a smaller but in some ways superior movie called The Great Arch about the Danish architect who won a design competition to build an iconic structure in the business district of Paris called La Défense in the 1980s.

And then... walked away from the construction after multiple disagreements with the build's French architect and Mitterrand's bureaucrats.

Today, that structure is one of the French capital's few world-renowned modern architectural icons.

You know, compared to other cultures' attitudes to tall buildings, the English have this passion for landscape, so the city came up with the idea of a kind of landscape of tall buildings, this envelope, with the lowlands in the middle and, you know, and the peak, and this was at the peak.

And that's totally different to the axial mind of La Défense or the well-positioned tall buildings of Frankfurt.

This is a cluster of massively dense buildings, and so the urban thinking becomes very three-dimensional and fascinating because of that.

So I think everything from the distant views to what it represents to the middle views and coming down to that ground has been one of urban negotiation within the cultural framework that the English landscape tradition has given us, actually.

Now, people do not go to see the Tour de Montparnasse because the Eiffel Tower represented changes in industry and steel and iron and all of this stuff, and the Tour de Montparnasse just represents a kind of an American approach to architecture that the found wanting.

And so, what they did subsequently is they built La Défense, which is outside of Paris, but you can see it if you stand, for example, in the Tuileries, or around there you can see it beyond the Arc de Triomphe, and that's where lots of business is.

That's the kind of Americanization of French architecture and business.

But generally the French have been very good of trying to Paris from the planners who would destroy the way the place looks with an Americanized kind of architecture.

... has been in Paris for a week, and tomorrow night, Saturday, September 12th, maybe you're in Paris walking through the Tuileries as you're listening to that podcast.

The gates open at 6:00 at, uh, Paris La Défense.

That's where the show is at.

Where is that compared to where we were?