Grande Arche de la Défense

The Arche de la Défense, or Grande Arche, is a monumental structure located in the La Défense business district, west of Paris, in the commune of Puteaux. It was inaugurated on 14 July 1989, at the time of the bicentenary of the Revolution, under the name ‘Grande Arche de la Fraternité’.

In 2016, the Arche de la Fraternité was listed and labelled as ‘Remarkable Contemporary Architecture’, and as such was added to the ‘Twentieth-Century Heritage’. The structure was designed by the Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen. Its construction was completed by the French architect Paul Andreu and the agency ADP. They were assisted by the engineers Erik Reitzel and Peter Rice.

The Arche does not have the usual form of a building, because it is an open-work cube that evokes an arch and ‘is characterised by its simplicity and its abstract character. It satisfies both the proponents of modernity through its austerity and the postmodernists who believe they recognise a typical figure from the history of architecture’. It is one of the major works of François Mitterrand carried out during his first term as President of the French Republic, and was built along the historic Parisian axis. It was originally intended to house the headquarters of the Carrefour international de la communication (CICOM or CIC), a public industrial and commercial establishment (EPIC), a project that was finally ‘struck off with a stroke of the pen’ in April 1986, after the defeat of the left in the legislative elections, and was instead turned into an office building.