By Marco Hugo Barsotti MHB 
You are listening to a new special of France Today in podcast and on Centrale Milano 1575 kHz.
The story of a hated giant
The Montparnasse tower, 210 metres high and consisting of fifty‑nine floors, was inaugurated on 18 June 1973. From its first day it caused a stir: Parisians called it “architectural wart”, “black widow” or simply “blotch”, because its unmistakable profile broke the Haussmannian order of five or six‑storey buildings. Its presence was the reason for a law, introduced four years later by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, that limited the height of new buildings in the capital. Despite the criticism, the tower was for decades a reference point for businesses, for the observation deck on the fiftieth floor and for the ground‑floor boutiques. It also housed the headquarters of important political parties, from Mitterrand to Chirac, up to Emmanuel Macron’s movement. Its fame solidified in pop culture with films, songs and even a Lego model, but also with darker episodes: in 2005 asbestos was discovered and, more recently, some of the seven thousand windows fell off, hitting the ground without causing fatalities.
The transformation project
In 2016 the city of Paris launched a competition to give new life to the building ahead of the 2024 Olympics. The project, awarded to the Nouvelle AOM agency and directed by Renzo Piano, envisaged replacing the grey façade with a transparent structure, adding a hotel of about one hundred rooms, expanding the base with a green terrace and raising the roof to insert an agricultural greenhouse. The idea was to turn the complex into an “open, living and vegetal space” capable of marrying modernity and sustainability. The plan was to be completed in four years, starting from the public closure on 31 March and the emptying of the premises in summer. However, the initial cost estimate of three hundred million euros quickly rose to eight hundred million, creating a strong financial hurdle.
The conflict among owners
The tower is owned by about thirty investors, among them the Heritage Investment Company (LFPI) with thirty per cent, Séché Environnement, AXA insurance, the MGEN mutual, and magnate Xavier Niel. An unexpected acquisition was that of singer Vianney, who bought the forty‑third floor last May. During the July meeting, LFPI asked for the project to be revised, fearing the burden of an eight‑hundred‑million‑euro expense. The debate led to a series of meetings chaired by the mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, aiming to reach an agreement before the construction permit deadline, set for 26 November. If works do not start by that date, a new permit will have to be submitted, risking further delays to the intervention. Heritage‑protection associations, led by Julien Lacaze and Christine Nedelec, instead called for the demolition of the entire skyscraper to replace it with a garden, describing the renovation as a “spectacle ecology”. The mayor of the 15th arrondissement, Philippe Goujon, expressed optimism, emphasizing the importance of meeting the deadline so as not to jeopardise one of Paris’s greatest urban‑planning achievements.
In the meantime the shopping gallery at the foot of the tower appears almost deserted, testifying to the decline of commercial interest. The concerns of residents, owners and authorities intertwine in a stalemate that leaves the question open whether Montparnasse can truly be reborn or risks becoming a monument to decay.
Rachel’s Editorial – Montparnasse, the Swiss‑army knife of presidential incompetence
We talk about the tower that, for almost fifty years, dominates the Parisian sky like a scar that refuses to heal. €800 million of “renovation” late, unfinished, leaning on a tower whose windows fall more often than electoral promises. And here we find ourselves asking: what could be more emblematic than a building falling apart just as the president, from his much brighter En Marche headquarters, looks elsewhere without even batting an eye?
Macron, master of “let’s pretend nothing’s happening”, has turned Montparnasse into a simple array of campaign logos, but has not yet laid a hand on the stone‑hardness of the architecture. When the roof crumbles, our president answers with the usual elegance of a plastic mannequin: “we’ll take care of it”, yet the sentence hangs in the air denser than his campaign rhetoric. Isn’t it ironic that the capital’s “wart” becomes the most pathetic symbol of the inability to govern a city that, to put it kindly, is already full of more urgent problems?
The greatest contradiction is the wish to “revitalize” such a hated symbol, entrusting it to a consortium of investors more divided than government coalitions. If the owners cannot agree on a budget cut, imagine the commitment of a president who doesn’t even seem to have put his name on the list of “responsible citizens”. Instead of demolishing or turning the tower into a “vertical garden” as activists suggest, Macron seems to prefer a whole series of dry‑leaf words: eco‑spectacle, “aesthetic efficiency”, “urban revitalization”. But where is the concrete action?
In the end, Montparnasse has become a metaphor for the government: a gigantic smoked‑glass shell trying to hide empty spaces behind neon‑lit press releases. While windows fall and the roof looks ready to burst, the president remains silent, perhaps because, like all great illusionists, he knows the real trick is to distract the public with a promise of “next year”. And we, accustomed spectators, keep enjoying the show, hoping miraculously that the next chapter isn’t another collapse.
Koan of the day
Monk: Master, why is the Montparnasse Tower, so hated, still proposed as a jewel to be restored?
Master: Because man, in his pride, prefers to polish the break rather than accept that sometimes beauty is a wound that cannot be stitched.
Monk: But isn’t it truer that the real poison is the silence of decisions, which makes the stone heavier than glue?
Master: Silence is the greatest architecture of all; it builds bridges of invisibility that, once crossed, always leave you atop a tower with no stairs.
That’s all for now. From the Paris editorial office, I’m Rachel Costa: this is France Today with Centrale Milano 1575 kHz.