Medea and Layetana were the developers with Ateliers Jean Nouvel as architects.
Location
West Gate was chosen as the location for the building in order to open the La Défense district to the municipality of Puteaux. The project’s ambition was to create a stronger polarity at the heart of the Île-de-France and develop a major attraction while relating the project to its natural and built environment and, lastly, embodying the various elements which strengthen the feeling that the project belongs in the district.
Outcome
The project was never built, and was cancelled due to the 2008 Financial Crisis. In 2009, Medea and Layetana announced they are not involved in the project anymore, and the new president of the EPAD Joëlle Ceccaldi-Raynaud declared her opposition to the tower which looks like an unaesthetic "monolith".
^Lebow, Arthur. "The Contextualizer,"New York Times. April 6, 2008, p. 4; excerpt, "...a skyscraper that Nouvel (adapting a term from the artist Brâncuși) called the “tour sans fins,” or endless tower. Conceived as a kind of minaret alongside the squat, monumental Grande Arche de La Défense, the endless tower has taken on some of the mystique of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Friedrichstrasse glass skyscraper of 1921. To obscure its lower end, the tower was designed to sit within a crater. Its facade, appearing to vanish in the sky, changed as it rose, from charcoal-colored granite to paler stone, then to aluminum and finally to glass that became increasingly reflective, all to enhance the illusion of dematerialization."
