At the end of this month, the last tenants will vacate the Tour Montparnasse in Paris to make way for its renovation. Nouvelle AOM, a collective of architects formed to respond to the project's international design competition, first won the commission back in 2017. And initially, the plan was to complete the renovation in time for the Paris Olympics in 2024.
But that time came and went, as it does, and now construction is starting this year. Nouvelle AOM, which includes Franklin Azzi Architecture, ChartierDalix Architectes, and Hardel Le Bihan Architectes, is in charge of the tower. And Renzo Piano Building Workshop is in charge of redesigning the commercial podium at the tower's base.
We've spoken about the Tour Montparnasse many times over the years on the blog (here, here, and here). Parisians customarily hate it, and after visiting it in 2023, I can confirm that it's desperately in need of a renovation, and that the ground plane experience is abysmal at best. It is of that era where grandiose "slab-based planning" was going to elevate us beyond the pathologies of fine-grained urbanism.
Here's a Google image from atop the site's enormous podium:
What's interesting about the design from Renzo Piano is that it will reuse a lot of the structure that's already in place. The plan is to carefully open up the site, stitch it back together with the surrounding urban context, and then build up from there. Importantly, at the centre of the project will be a large, planted piazza that is intended to become a new civic space for the community.
The project renovations are expected to last until "at least 2030." So, we have several years until we'll know if it's an urban and financial success. But my prediction is that this project will positively transform how Parisians think about the Tour Montparnasse, and maybe how they think about tall buildings.
The tower itself will, of course, need to be beautiful. It's a highly visible object. There's only a trifecta of buildings and structures inside Paris proper that exceed 150 meters in height: the Eiffel Tower, Tour Montparnasse, and the Tour Triangle (Herzog & de Meuron), which is currently under construction and expected to finish this year. In this case, architecture is not irrelevant.
But it is the ground plane experience that will ultimately revitalize the area and demonstrate that tall buildings can be good urban neighbours, even in a sea of Haussmannian mid-rise buildings. I've said before that the reconfiguration of the podium is arguably the project's most crucial design move.
Get it right and you'll see what happens.
Cover photo by Luxigon via Nouvelle AOM
Aerial and street view photos from Google
Model photos from Renzo Piano Building Workshop
"The problem with buses," writes transportation planner Nithin Vejendla in Work in Progress, "is that they are slow." The same thing could also be said about other surface transit routes like Toronto's streetcars, including some of our new lines. Now, there are lots of ways to speed up surface routes. Dedicated lanes and signal priority are two obvious ones. But an even simpler one is to just get rid of some stops!
North American cities tend to be plagued by too many transit stops. I think we do it because more stops sounds better than fewer stops. It creates the illusion of servicing more people. But too many stops can make routes painfully slow, by increasing dwell times. According to Nithin, buses in the US spend about 20% of their time just stopping and then starting again. Obviously the more stops you have, the worse this downtime gets.
Here's the average spacing between bus stops for various US cities taken from the above article:
If I convert some of these numbers into the system of measurement used by the rest of the planet, you'll find the following average stop spacings:
172 m in Philadelphia
205 m in Chicago
210 m in San Francisco
240 m in New York
260 m in Miami
350 m in Seattle
425 m in Las Vegas
European cities tend to have wider stop spacing, somewhere closer to 300–450 m. And as a further point of comparison, AI tells me that the current average streetcar stop spacing in Toronto is about 250 m, but that the official target for both streetcars and local buses is between 300–400 m. This is better. 400 m is a 5-minute walk. And if you're on the transit corridor, it means you'll never have to walk more than 200 m, or 2-3 minutes, to the next stop.
Consolidating stops has been shown not to have a meaningful impact on coverage area, but the benefits are significant. To give just one example, Los Angeles saw its operating speeds increase by 29% and its ridership grow by 33% on the Wilshire/Whittier Metro Rapid corridor by doing exactly this. So, if you're looking for a way to speed up your surface routes, one starting point would be to just do less.
There is a school of thought that elevated rail is bad, or at least suboptimal, for cities. The thinking is that it's a visual blight, it's noisy, it disconnects neighbourhoods, and it can even reduce surrounding real estate values. Having a train passing directly in front of your window is admittedly less ideal than not having a train passing directly in front of your window.
But there is no shortage of examples from around the world where elevated rail does far more to benefit a community than detract from it. Tokyo is perhaps the obvious place to look. It is decidedly rail-oriented city with the majority of its network above ground and countless examples of active commercial spaces being tucked under and adjacent to elevated rail.
Here, for example, is a restaurant that I visited on my last trip and that was immediately adjacent to a track:
But you don't have to travel all the way to Japan to find examples where elevated rail does little to detract from the urban experience. Here's Marine Drive station in Vancouver, integrated into a newish development:
And here's what the elevated guideway looks like as it heads toward the station:
The obvious advantage of elevated rail is that it's significantly cheaper than underground rail. According to global data collected by the Transit Costs Project at New York University, underground rail tends to be at least 2x the cost — often it's even more. Are the benefits worth this additional cost, and is it worth building less overall transit with the same capital budget?
Elevated rail is not without its drawbacks, but good design and urban sensibilities can help to mitigate many of them. As is the case with a lot of urban design, what matters most is how we treat the ground plane underneath the rail. So, to the extent that it remains out there, I think it's time we get rid of any stigmas associated with elevated rail. More transit is better than less transit.
Cover photo by Daiji Sasahara on Unsplash