Built in 1976 at the outskirts of La Défense business district, the Tours Aillaud are named after their main architect, Emile Aillaud. The housing project represents 18 towers including 1,607 apartments all together. The tallest of those are the Tours 1 and 2 with 39 floors and a height of 105 meters. The Tours 3 to 10 have 20 floors and the Tours 11 to 18 have 13 floors.
Despite the differences in height, the towers share the same shape, consisting of the superposition of several cylinders. Their cladding is made of frescos representing clouds in the sky (in French nuages), which is the origin of their nickname.
The frescos in "pate de verre" were designed by Fabio Rieti, son-in-law of Emile Aillaud, while his daughter Laurence Rieti designed the large snake shaped sculpture that constitutes a large part of the playground area near the highest towers. Emile Aillaud noticeably looked after the outdoor area so that there would be one tree per apartment, and so that each apartment would have a designated tree (there were more than 1600 of them).
Without respect for the body as it is, social memory as it stands, there is no such thing as a workable or humane architecture. And that’s why a place like this - La Defence outside Paris, is experienced by everybody, including those who live in it, as a piece of social scar tissue, gimmicky, condescending alphaville modernism. Stick ‘em in concrete boxes and give them some concrete to play on, and then paint it all bright colours because that’s what the kiddies like, and if the kiddies don’t like it, they can write to the minister!
Central Plaza is a 78-storey, 374 m (1,227 ft) skyscraper completed in August 1992 at 18 Harbour Road, in Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island in Hong Kong. It is the third tallest tower in the city after 2 International Finance Centre in Central and the ICC in West Kowloon. It was the tallest building in Asia from 1992 to 1996, until the Shun Hing Square was built in Shenzhen, a neighbouring city. Central Plaza surpassed the Bank of China Tower as the tallest building in Hong Kong until the completion of 2 IFC.
The Eiffel Tower is a wrought-iron lattice tower on the Champ de Mars in Paris, France. It is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower from 1887 to 1889.
A skyscraper is a tall continuously habitable building having multiple floors. Modern sources define skyscrapers as being at least 100 meters (330 ft) or 150 meters (490 ft) in height, though there is no universally accepted definition, other than being very tall high-rise buildings. Historically, the term first referred to buildings with between 10 and 20 stories when these types of buildings began to be constructed in the 1880s. Skyscrapers may host offices, hotels, residential spaces, and retail spaces.
Tour Maine-Montparnasse, also commonly named Tour Montparnasse, is a 210-metre (689 ft) office skyscraper in the Montparnasse area of Paris, France. Constructed from 1969 to 1973, it was the tallest skyscraper in France until 2011, when it was surpassed by the 231-metre (758 ft) Tour First in the La Défense business district west of Paris's city limits. It remains the tallest building in Paris proper and the third tallest in France, behind Tour First and Tour Hekla. As of July 2023, it is the 53rd-tallest building in Europe.
La Défense is the major business district in France's Paris metropolitan area, 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) west of the city limits. It is located in Île-de-France region's department of Hauts-de-Seine in the communes of Courbevoie, La Garenne-Colombes, Nanterre, and Puteaux.
A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building, as opposed to a low-rise building and is defined differently in terms of height depending on the jurisdiction. It is used as a residential, office building, or other functions including hotel, retail, or with multiple purposes combined. Residential high-rise buildings are also known in some varieties of English, such as British English, as tower blocks and may be referred to as MDUs, standing for multi-dwelling units. A very tall high-rise building is referred to as a skyscraper.
The Bank of America Corporate Center is an 871 ft (265 m) skyscraper in Uptown Charlotte, North Carolina. Designed by Argentine architect César Pelli and HKS Architects, and best known as the headquarters of the namesake Bank of America, it has been the tallest building in North Carolina since its 1992 construction, the 56th-tallest building in the United States, and the 174th-tallest building in the world.
Eureka Tower is a 297.3 m (975 ft) skyscraper located in the Southbank precinct of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Construction began in August 2002 and the exterior was completed on 1 June 2006. The plaza was finished in June 2006 and the building was officially opened on 11 October 2006. The project was designed by Melbourne architectural firm Fender Katsalidis Architects and was built by Grocon. The developer of the tower was Eureka Tower Pty Ltd, a joint venture consisting of Daniel Grollo (Grocon), investor Tab Fried and one of the Tower's architects Nonda Katsalidis.
The Trump International Hotel and Tower is a skyscraper condo-hotel in downtown Chicago, Illinois. The building, named for Donald Trump, was designed by architect Adrian Smith of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Bovis Lend Lease built the 100-story structure, which reaches a height of 1,388 feet (423.2 m) including its spire, its roof topping out at 1,171 feet (357 m). It is next to the main branch of the Chicago River, with a view of the entry to Lake Michigan beyond a series of bridges over the river. The building received publicity when the winner of the first season of The Apprentice reality television show, Bill Rancic, chose to manage the construction of the tower over managing a Rancho Palos Verdes–based Trump National Golf Course & Resort in the Los Angeles metro area.
The Shard, also referred to as the Shard London Bridge and formerly London Bridge Tower, is a pyramid-shaped 72-storey mixed-use development supertall skyscraper, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, in Bermondsey, London, that forms part of The Shard Quarter development. Standing 309.6 metres high, The Shard is the tallest building in the United Kingdom, the seventh-tallest building in Europe, and the second-tallest outside Russia behind the Varso Tower in Warsaw, which beats the Shard by less than half a metre. It is also the second-tallest free-standing structure in the United Kingdom, after the concrete tower of the Emley Moor transmitting station. The Shard replaced Southwark Towers, a 24-storey office block built on the site in 1975.
The Burj Khalifa is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is the world's tallest structure. With a total height of 829.8 m and a roof height of 828 m (2,717 ft), the Burj Khalifa has been the tallest structure and building in the world since its topping out in 2009, surpassing Taipei 101, the previous holder of that status.
Émile Aillaud was a French architect.
OneEleven is a luxury rental apartment tower located in downtown Chicago, Illinois. The building is located between LaSalle Street and Clark Street, adjacent to River North and directly on the Chicago River.
Société Générale Twin Towers are two office skyscrapers located in La Défense, a high-rise business district, and in Nanterre, France, west of Paris. Their exterior designs are identical. They are the second tallest twin towers in the EU and Europe’s third tallest twin towers after City of Capitals in Moscow and Les Mercuriales twin towers in Paris.
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.
71 South Wacker is an American office tower in Chicago completed in 2005. The 48-story skyscraper stands at 679 feet on 71 South Wacker Drive. It is owned by the Irvine Company.
Aqua is an 82-story mixed-use skyscraper in Lakeshore East, downtown Chicago, Illinois. Designed by a team led by Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang Architects, with James Loewenberg of Loewenberg & Associates as the Architect of Record, it includes five levels of parking below ground. The building's eighty-story, 140,000 sq ft (13,000 m2) base is topped by a 82,550 sq ft (7,669 m2) terrace with gardens, gazebos, pools, hot tubs, a walking/running track and a fire pit. Each floor covers approximately 16,000 sq ft (1,500 m2).
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 Ping An Finance Center is a 115-storey, 599.1 m (1,966 ft) supertall skyscraper in Shenzhen, Guangdong, China. The building was commissioned by Ping An Insurance and designed by the American architectural firm Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates. It was completed in 2017, and is the tallest building in Shenzhen, the 2nd tallest building in China and the 5th tallest building in the world. It also broke the record of having the highest observation deck in a building at 562 m (1,844 ft). It is the second largest skyscraper in the world by floor area after Azabudai Hills Main Tower in Tokyo, Japan.
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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