La Défense

La Défense (French: [la de.fɑ̃s]) is a major business district, three kilometres west of the city limits of Paris. It is part of the Paris Metropolitan Area in the Île-de-France region, located in the department Hauts-de-Seine spread across the communes of Courbevoie, Nanterre, and Puteaux.

La Défense is Europe’s largest purpose-built business district with 560 hectares (1,400 acres) of the area, 72 glass and steel buildings (of which 19 are completed skyscrapers), 180,000 daily workers, and 3,500,000 square meters (38,000,000 sq ft) of office space. Around its Grande Arche and esplanade (“le Parvis”), La Défense contains many of the Paris urban area‘s tallest high-rises.

The district is located at the westernmost extremity of the 10-kilometre-long (6.2 mi) Historical Axis of Paris, which starts at the Louvre in Central Paris and continues along the Champs-Élysées, well beyond the Arc de Triomphe along the Avenue de la Grande Armée before culminating at La Défense. The district is centred in an orbital motorway straddling the Hauts-de-Seinedépartement municipalities of Courbevoie, Nanterre, and Puteaux. La Défense is primarily a business district and hosts a population of 25,000 permanent residents and 45,000 students. La Défense is also visited by 8,000,000 tourists each year and houses an open-air museum.

La Défense is named after the statue La Défense de Paris by Louis-Ernest Barrias, which was erected in 1883 to commemorate the soldiers who had defended Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

In September 1958, The Public Establishment for Installation of La Défense (fr) (EPAD) buildings (of which the Esso Tower was the very first) were built and began to slowly replace the city’s factories, shanties, and even a few farms. The Center of New Industries and Technologies (CNIT) was built and first used in 1958. These “first generation” skyscrapers were all very similar in appearance, limited to a height of 100 meters (330 ft). In 1966, the Nobel Tower was the first office skyscraper built in the area. In 1970, the RER line A railway was opened from La Défense to Étoile. In 1974, a contract for a Défense-Cergy high-speed hovercraft train was signed and soon abandoned.

In the early 1970s, in response to great demand, the second generation of buildings began to appear, but the economic crisis in 1973 nearly halted all construction in the area. The third generation of towers began to appear in the early 1980s. The biggest shopping center in Europe (at the time), the Quatre Temps, was created in 1981. In 1982, the EPAD launched the Tête Défensecompetition to find a monument to complete the Axe Historique, which eventually led to the construction of Grande Arche at the west end of the quarter. During the same period, hotels were constructed, the CNIT was restructured, and in 1992, Line 1 of the Paris Métro was extended to La Défense, which made the area readily accessible to even more of the city.^{[citation needed]}

On Bastille Day 1990, French electronic composer Jean Michel Jarre staged an ambitious concert at the site, using the Grande Arche and three of the area’s towers as projection screens, and building a pyramidal stage above the road. The free concert, titled simply Paris la Defense, attracted two million spectators, stretching all the way back to the Arc de Triomphe. This beat Jarre’s own previous world record for the largest attendance for a musical concert. After Jean Michel Jarre, German DJ Sash! and the singer La Trec have set at La Défense the videoclip for their song Stay in 1997.

After a stagnation in new development in the mid-1990s, La Défense is once again expanding and is now the largest purpose-built business district in Europe.

Important corporations headquartered at La Défense include Neuf Cegetel, Société Générale, Total, Aventis, Areva, and Arcelor. The tallest skyscraper, the Tour First belongs to AXA, constructed in 1974. It is 231 metres (758 ft) high, has 50 floors, and is the highest inhabited building in the Paris area (a title previously held by the Tour Montparnasse, which was the tallest inhabited building until the Tour First was renovated between 2007 and 2011, bringing it to its current height from a previous 159 meters (522 ft); the tallest structure in Paris is the Eiffel Tower).

On 9 September 2008, La Défense celebrated its 50th anniversary with a huge fireworks display.

In December 2005, Bernard Bled, CEO & Chairman of EPAD (La Defense Management & Development Office) announced an ambitious 9-year development plan called “La Defense 2006–2015”.This important modernization plan has to give a new dimension to the district and focuses on four main axes: regenerate outdated skyscrapers, allow new buildings, improve the balance between offices and residential housing and make the transport of local employees from their homes to La Défense easier. There are 3 aims: building 150,000 square meters (1,600,000 sq ft) of offices within demolition/rebuilding projects, building 300,000 square meters (3,200,000 sq ft) of offices within new projects, and building 100,000 square meters (1,100,000 sq ft) of housing.

The government confirmed in July 2006 this plan which has to be carried out around 2015. It is justified by the strong estate pressure, which plays in favour of building new skyscrapers near Paris. Those constructions have also the advantage to be more economical than little buildings. But it will have to overcome some difficulties: French economy faces a short-term slowdown; the government tries to balance tertiary sector employment in the whole region again, because La Défense today concentrates a major part of those jobs; and traffic is already saturated in the district, while it would need huge investments to extend transport infrastructures.

It launched high-profile international competitions and/or construction greenlight of several key 300-to-320-meter (980 to 1,050 ft) tall sustainable development-style skyscrapers such as Tour Signal, Tour Phare, Hermitage Plaza, and Tour Generali. During said December 2005 Press Conference, EPAD released to the public an elaborate 3D animation film titled “La Défense 2016”.

Upcoming highrise buildings (2016–2021)

Name	Use	Height		Levels	Municipality	Status (2016)	Estimated Year of Completion
		metres	feet
Hermitage Plaza II	mix	323	1,060	86	Courbevoie	Construction start in 2018	2024
Hermitage Plaza I	mix	323	1,060	85	Courbevoie	Construction start in 2018	2024
The Link	office	244	801	52	Puteaux	proposed	2023
Tour Sister 1	office	229	718	55	Courbevoie	Construction start in 2018	2022
Tour Hekla	office	220	722	51	Puteaux	Under construction	2022
Tour Jardins de l’Arche	office & hotel	210	656	54	Nanterre	approved	2022
Tour Saint-Gobain	office	178	584	39	Courbevoie	Under construction	2019
Tour Alto	office	160	492	38	Courbevoie	Under construction	2020
Tour Trinity	office	151	459	32	Courbevoie	Under construction	2019
Tours Sister 2	office	131	396	26	Courbevoie	Construction start in 2018	2022
Vinci Headquarter	office	108	354	24	Nanterre	Under construction	2020
Rose de Cherbourg residence	housing	75	246	20	Puteaux	Under construction	2018

{ the text copied from: https://en.wikipedia.org }

🔆Websites about La Défense:
💥 https://www.ladefense.fr/
💥 https://www.ladefense.fr/en/history-place/
💥 https://www.aviewoncities.com/paris/defense.htm/
💥 https://wikitravel.org/en/Paris/La_D%C3%A9fense/
💥  https://www.les4temps.com/en/

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The Rhein in Düsseldorf, Deutschland

Aachener Rathaus

Aachen Town Hall (Aachener Rathaus) in Germany

Aachen Town Hall (German: Rathaus) is located opposite to the Aachen Cathedral and is one of the most striking structures in the Altstadt of Aachen, Germany. It is built in the Gothic architecture.
In the first half of the 14th century, Aachen’s citizenry built the city hall under the leadership of its acting mayor Gerhard Chorus (1285–1367) as a sign of their civic freedom. Yet, they had to promise to establish a space in the new town hall that could host the traditional coronation feast that was part of the coronation ceremony of the Holy Roman Empire. Up to then, the nearby mid-13th-century Grashaus – which is one of the city’s oldest still-standing buildings – had served the community in that function. Construction began in 1330 on top of the foundation walls of the Aula Regia, part of the derelict Palace of Aachen, built during the Carolingian dynasty. Dating from the time of Charlemagne, the Granus Tower and masonry from that era were incorporated into the south side of the building.^[1] The structure was completed in 1349, and while the town hall served as the administrative center of the city, part of the city’s munitions and weaponry was housed in the Granus Tower, which also served as a prison for some time.

Aachen’s city hall survived World War I without sustaining damage, but during the civil unrest that arose in the course of a separatists’ movement whose goal was the creation of an independent Rhenish Republic, City Hall was stormed by a group of separatists who caused serious damage both to its interior and exterior. Parts of the façade, such as adorning statues and both clocks, were broken, as were all window panes on the first floor on the Market side. Additionally, several rooms inside the building were ransacked, and many of the famed frescoes within were heavily damaged by gunfire. The furniture (especially that within the mayoral office and Coronation Hall) were damaged as they were used as projectiles. In the Emperor Hall, an undetonated bomb was discovered.^[4]

During World War II, Aachen City Hall was heavily damaged by bombing raids, especially those occurring on 14 July 1943 and 11 April 1944. On 14 July 1943 the roof of the building and both towers burned, and afterwards the structure retained a distinctive shape due to the heat that twisted the steel skeletons inside the tower caps. The Coronation Hall was again heavily damaged and the north facing wall was moved in places up to 30 centimeters vertically. The imminent threat of collapse was staved off through the use of emergency beams that held the structure in place. Because of rain penetrating the interior of the building, its frescoes were severely affected, and five of the eight were carefully removed by Franz Stiewi and stored at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum.

The architect Professor Otto Gruber and the building engineer Professor Richard Stumpf prepared a report in 1945 about the structural integrity of the building. With the help of Professor Josef Pirlet, the dilapidated north façade was reinforced with steel and tension bars, and in 1946, the building’s roof was repaired using makeshift sheets of zinc. After the structural analysis was conducted and the foreground was reinforced, the replacement of the north façade had to take place, since almost all of the arches there were broken. The arches on the ground floor were again closed for repairs in 1950, and the reconstruction of the Emperor Hall was largely completed by 1953, with the configuration of the room following in the next few years.

The question of how the tower caps should be rebuilt remained at the heart of a controversial discussion. In 1966 Professor Wilhelm K. Fischer, who had worked extensively in the reconstruction of Aachen, produced a sketch for the towers’ design, as students from RWTH Aachen University also took part in the debate, submitted 24 designs for consideration. In 1968 eight additional expert designs were submitted to a working group whose task it was to rebuild the towers, and after discussing several modern looks, the group settled on a design by the conservation-restoration expert Leo Hugot, who stuck tightly to the historical image of the towers. The tower caps were finally finished in 1978.

Today, replicas of the Imperial Regalia from the Viennese Imperial Treasury reside in the city hall. These replicas were made around 1915 by order of Emperor Wilhelm II for an exhibition to recall the 31 coronations that took place in Aachen between 813 and 1531. Among the replicas are a copy of the Vienna Coronation Gospels, the Sabre of Charlemagne, the Imperial Crown of Otto I, and the Imperial Orb.

Since 2009, Aachen City Hall has been a station on the Route Charlemagne, a tour program by which historical sights of Aachen are presented to visitors. At the city hall, a museum exhibition explains the history and art of the building and gives a sense of the historical coronation banquets that took place there. A portrait of Napoleon from 1807 by Louis-André-Gabriel Bouchet and one of his wife Joséphinefrom 1805 by Robert Lefèvre are viewable as part of the tour.

{the text copied from: en.wikipedia.org}
✨✨ Websites may help you on this topic:
✴ http://www.aachen.de/DE/kultur_freizeit/kultur/dom_rathaus/rathaus/index.html
✴ http://rathaus-aachen.de/
✴ http://rathaus-aachen.de/en/town-hall/
✴ http://www.route-charlemagne.eu/Stationen/Rathaus/
✴ https://www.aachen-tourismus.de/erleben-entdecken/sehenswuerdigkeiten/aachener-rathaus-markt/

 

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