View of the proposed restructuring of the Maine-Montparnasse shopping center. RENZO PIANO BUILDING WORKSHOP
The models were elegant, and the presentation aimed to be compelling. With a simple gesture, the architect Renzo Piano, 88, winner of the 1998 Pritzker Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize of architecture," grabbed a light wood quadrilateral and removed its upper part. "We're only taking this off, the rest, we leave untouched," he said. Suddenly, the shopping center in the emblematic Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, a legacy of the 1970s slab urbanism and long closed in on itself, was transformed into a traversable space, with open and transparent ground floors.
"We're adding this white structure," he continued, before the journalists invited on Wednesday, January 7, to discover his project at Paris City Hall. "A square in the middle, we're planting 151 trees in total, it's not amazing, but it's still pretty good. On the roofs, I want to see hundreds of young people playing sports; there, in this public building [a cube at the foot of the tall Montparnasse tower], young people playing music." There will be a student residence and new public spaces. There will also be an additional 11,000 square meters of office space and fewer shops. However, Piano did not dwell on that point.
