La Defense

La Defense was planned from the 1950s to keep towers out of central Paris, and its organising idea is separation: the whole district sits on a raised pedestrian slab about a kilometre long, with roads, rail, metro and parking stacked beneath it, so nobody at street level meets a car. The Grande Arche, completed in 1989, is a hollow cube of about a hundred and ten metres faced in Carrara marble, aligned on the historic axis running from the Louvre through the Concorde obelisk and the Arc de Triomphe, and deliberately turned a few degrees off it for engineering reasons. Around sixty works of public sculpture stand on the slab.

What you actually see

• The Grande Arche - a hollow marble cube closing the historic axis.
• The pedestrian slab - a raised deck with all traffic beneath it.
• The public sculpture - Calder, Miro and around sixty other works.
• The axis view - the line running back to the Arc de Triomphe and Louvre.

When to go

Year-round; the district empties at weekends, which makes the architecture easier to see and the atmosphere strange. The Grande Arche roof reopened in 2017 with a viewing terrace.

Honest expectations

At weekends and evenings the slab is deserted and windy. The area is a working business district with little for visitors beyond architecture and a large shopping centre. Wind funnelling between towers is notorious.

Nearby

The Bois de Boulogne lies southeast; central Paris is east along the axis.