The esplanade of Les Olympiades, with Paris's Chinatown at the far southern edge.
Les Olympiades is a district of residential towers located in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, France. Built from 1969 to 1974, the district consists of a dozen towers built along a huge esplanade, elevated eight metres from the ground, that is dedicated to pedestrians. A shopping mall, known as the Pagode, stands at the centre of the esplanade. Below it are streets dedicated to vehicular traffic. Shops and boutiques can easily receive deliveries on the lower level. The main entrances to the residential towers are on the esplanade.
Les Olympiades are designed similarly to the esplanade of La Défense. The Olympiades esplanade has maintained a rather important business and commercial activity, something that is not true of other projects in Paris and its suburbs. The northern part of the neighbourhood is typical of the 13th arrondissement, with the Parc de Choisy and Lycée Claude Monet at the northern edge of the Olympiades and the Place d'Italie three blocks north.
The eight tallest towers are each 104 metres (341feet) tall and are named after cities that have hosted the Olympic games: Anvers (Antwerp), Athènes (Athens), Cortina (Cortina d'Ampezzo), Helsinki, Londres (London), Mexico (Mexico City), Sapporo, and Tokyo. Other residential buildings, which are wider than they are tall, complete the district. The opening in June 2007, of the new Métro station at Les Olympiades, as part of the driverless hi-speed Metro line 14 running every 4 minutes, brought Les Olympiades residents and visitors to the Olympiades complex and its esplanade — shops, restaurants, apartments, and recreational facilities — within 11-14 minutes of Saint-Lazare, Madeleine, and Pyramides on the opposite side of Paris and 2–4 minutes from the new Cour Saint-Émilion entertainment centre and Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterrand.
Les Olympiades were built with the aspiration that a population of young professionals would be attracted to the complex offering multiple services (education, sports, etc.), a plan known and later criticized as Italie 13. From 1975, its southern end began to attract Vietnamese and Chinese residents, who also populated the main Chinatown in Paris around the southern end of the complex. Since the end of Project Italie 13 the Paris Rive Gauche project began. Starting a few hundred metres from the Olympiades, is the second large-scale urbanism project inside the city of Paris to be built since Italie 13, and they now form a geographic unity with a new influx of professionals and office, education, library, and other complexes, including the François Mitterrand Bibliothèque nationale de France.
La Défense is a major business district in France, located 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of the city limits of Paris. It is part of the Paris metropolitan area in the Île-de-France region, located in the department of Hauts-de-Seine in the communes of Courbevoie, La Garenne-Colombes, Nanterre, and Puteaux.
The 13th arrondissement of Paris is one of the 20 arrondissements of the capital city of France. In spoken French, the arrondissement is referred to as le treizième.
Bercy is a station on Line 6 and Line 14 of the Paris Métro. It is located at the intersection of the Boulevard de Bercy and the Rue de Bercy in the neighbourhood of Bercy in the 12th arrondissement.
Paris Métro Line 14 is one of the sixteen lines on the Paris Métro. It connects the stations Mairie de Saint-Ouen and Olympiades on a north-west south-east diagonal via the three major stations of Gare Saint-Lazare, The Châtelet–Les-Halles complex and the Gare de Lyon. The line goes through the centre of Paris, and reaches the communes of Saint-Ouen-sur-Seine and Clichy.
Bibliothèque François Mitterrand station is a station of the Paris Métro and RER, named after the former French president, François Mitterrand, and serving the area surrounding the new building of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), whose site near the station is also named after Mitterrand, and the Paris Diderot University. It is a transfer point between Line 14 of the Paris Metro and the RER C. It is situated on the Paris–Bordeaux railway.
Historical quarters of Paris are areas of Paris, France that have retained an older character, usually identifiable by commercial or cultural activity and often named for a neighborhood landmark. These sections often are not referenced on modern-day maps of Paris, crossing current arrondissements.
Rue Zadkine is a commercial street in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, named after the sculptor of Russian descent Ossip Zadkine. It runs from the Rue Baudoin to the Rue Duchefdelaville. It has a length of some 90m, and broadens from a width of 15m to 25m along its length.
The Tour Super-Italie is a residential skyscraper in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, France. Its exact address is 121-127, Avenue d'Italie. The mainly residential tower was built by the architect Maurice Novarina, assisted by the architects Jacques Giovannoni and Léger. It includes a private indoor swimming pool and a solarium accessible by a staircase from the 34th floor.
Front de Seine is a development in the district of Beaugrenelle in Paris, France, located along the river Seine in the 15th arrondissement at the south of the Eiffel Tower. It is, with the 13th arrondissement, one of the few districts in the city of Paris containing highrise buildings, as most have been constructed outside the city.
Italie 13 is the name of a large urbanism project in Paris which started in the 1960s and was interrupted in the 1970s. Its purpose was to profoundly modify the structure of some areas of the 13th arrondissement, mainly around the Avenue d'Italie which inspired its name. The partially completed project led to the creation of numerous towers in the south of the arrondissement, notably Les Olympiades.
The Place d'Italie is a public space in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. The square has an average dimension somewhat less than 200 meters in extent, and the following streets meet there:
Olympiades is the southern terminus of Line 14 of the Paris Métro.
The Passerelle Simone-de-Beauvoir is a bridge solely for pedestrians and cyclists across the Seine River in Paris. It is the 37th bridge on the Seine in Paris. It is located between the bridges of Pont de Bercy and Pont de Tolbiac and links up the 12th and 13th arrondissements of Paris. Its nearest Paris Metro station is Quai de la Gare.
The Parc de Bercy is a public park located along the Rive Droite in the 12th arrondissement of Paris. Development started in 1994 on the site of a former wine depot before an official opening three years later by Mayor Jean Tiberi. Sponsored by President François Mitterrand, the project covered 14 hectares.
The Grands Projets of François Mitterrand was an architectural programme to provide modern monuments in Paris, the city of monuments, symbolising France's role in art, politics and the economy at the end of the 20th century. The programme was initiated by François Mitterrand, the 21st President of France, while he was in office. Mitterrand viewed the civic building projects, estimated at the time to cost the Government of France 15.7 billion francs, both as a revitalisation of the city, as well as contemporary architecture promoted by Socialist Party politics. The scale of the project and its ambitious nature was compared to the major building schemes of Louis XIV.
Paris Rive Gauche is a new neighbourhood in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, on the left bank of the Seine. The district is bordered by the Seine, the railway tracks of Gare d'Austerlitz and the Boulevard Périphérique. This 130 ha plot of land has 10 ha of green spaces and 2,000 trees. Paris Rive Gauche is divided into three districts along the Seine: Austerlitz, Tolbiac and Massena.
Paris, the capital of France, has many of the country's most important libraries. The Bibliothèque nationale de France operates public libraries in Paris, among them the François-Mitterrand, Richelieu, Louvois, Opéra, and Arsenal.
This article presents the main landmarks in the city of Paris within administrative limits, divided by its 20 arrondissements. Landmarks located in the suburbs of Paris, outside of its administrative limits, while within the metropolitan area are not included in this article.
The city of Paris has notable examples of architecture of every period, from the Middle Ages to the 21st century. It was the birthplace of the Gothic style, and has important monuments of the French Renaissance, Classical revival, the Flamboyant style of the reign of Napoleon III, the Belle Époque, and the Art Nouveau style. The great Exposition Universelle (1889) and 1900 added Paris landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower and Grand Palais. In the 20th century, the Art Deco style of architecture first appeared in Paris, and Paris architects also influenced the postmodern architecture of the second half of the century.
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