Two Hated Buildings We Love to See

Tour Montparnasse Parisians hate the Tour Montparnasse, a 59-story, 1970’s black monolith that towers over their historic, tres charmante city like no other buildings for miles.  The only thing it’s good for, they say, is the incredible view of the Eternal City you get from the observation floor.  And the best part of that view is not the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame, but the fact that it’s the only place in Paris where you don’t have to see the Tour Montparnasse.  

Indeed in this week’s Sunday New York Times there’s a feature piece  “Seven Leading Architects Defend the World’s Most Hated Buildings,” where they ask architects (not the original designers, but others with presumably the longer view than preservationists or aesthetes) to reflect on these monstrosities.  And Daniel Libeskind defends the Tour:

“It’s legendary for being the most hated building in Paris. I want to defend it not because it’s a particularly beautiful tower, but because of the idea it represents. Parisians panicked when they saw it, and when they abandoned the tower they also abandoned the idea of a high-density sustainable city. Because they exiled all future high rises to some far neighborhood like La Défense, they were segregating growth. Parisians reacted aesthetically, as they are wont to do, but they failed to consider the consequences of what it means to be a vital, living city versus a museum city. People sentimentalize their notions of the city, but with the carbon footprint, the waste of resources, our shrinking capacity, we have no choice but to build good high-rise buildings that are affordable. It’s not by coincidence that people are going to London now not just for work but for the available space. No young company can afford Paris. Maybe Tour Montparnasse is not a work of genius, but it signified a notion of what the city of the future will have to be.”

So great was the outcry when the Tour Montparnasse was completed in 1973, then the tallest building in Europe, that Paris passed a law restricting all buildings in the central city to seven floors, and sent all future skyscrapers, as Libeskind says, to the outskirts of town.  Medieval Paris or Renaissance Paris or Baron Haussmann 19^th century Paris or whatever époque you think defines Paris, that was to be the standard; modern Paris could not come in and play.

In my town of Monterey, California we also have a building we love to hate.   Likewise built in the 70’s, it was originally called the Best Western Monterey Beach Resort and it’s a typical concrete balconied multi-story hotel built atop the massive dunes right on the shores of Monterey Bay.  Until then the dunes hosted only birds and an ancient sand company. 

Monterey HotelLike Paris’ Tour, this “tower” of gaudy corporate tourism caused such a public outcry, not just for its ugliness, but for the coastal erosion it effects on the dunes and beach, that the Coastal Commission immediately tightened its building code the way Paris did; no other building of its size and style will ever be built again so close to the beach and bay.

So I was checking on the map to make sure I had the hotel’s name right, and –fun with corporations! – the Best Western Monterey Beach Resort has recently been bought and re-branded.  It’s now called the “Unscripted Monterey Bay Hotel.”  That’s right, “unscripted.”  “Write your own script,” it happily invites its guests. 

This international chain describes itself this way: “ We are beautifully designed, accessibly-priced alternatives to the sea of homogenous products in the upscale hotel space.  Contemporary but not trendy, Unscripted Hotels focus on healthful yet lively environments and responsible food choices, with skin-friendly bath amenities and a sleep-to-wake systems that use light to simulate dawn.  By subscribing to the philosophy that travel should be an adventure, not a routine, Unscripted invites guests to write their own story.”

If Unscripted is a weird, ironic name for a hotel, Mont Parnasse is not much better.  The mythological mountain home of the Greek muses, the left bank Paris neighborhood was so named by 16th century Sorbonne lit majors who recited poetry on its hillside above campus.  What do the muses of art and music and poetry think of the neighborhood today?  More irony; the hill was razed, flattened, to build the Boulevard Montparnasse, that was probably Baron Haussmann.  So the “Mont” may be gone, but a phallic tower has taken its place.

Not unlike the irony in Monterey, where free-spirited, upscale tourists, er adventurers, can now stay at an “unscripted” hotel. And here too another hill, this one of sand, was razed and flattened to improve the experience.

Wait a minute, Libeskind would say.  It’s the 21^st century.  Paris and Monterey are not museums.  We need young entrepreneurs and new businesses and sustainable buildings.  Mixed use.  “Vital living cities.”  This is the challenge of urban planning.

These hated ugly buildings do serve a purpose.  They can’t be ignored. We have to see them every day from every corner.  They serve as public reminders, symbols of caution or defeat; Never Again!  Better of course that they had never been built, or later demolished.  But like a war memorial, or those creepy skull and crossbones road signs in France marking traffic fatalities, the buildings say, “Careful!” “Danger!” “”Don’t go so fast!”

Might those words be the “script” the muses of Mount Parnassus would write?

Copyright © 2105 Deborah Streeter