Place du Colonel Fabien

The headquarters of the French Communist Party sits behind a sweeping, curved facade of white concrete and glass. It rises above the Place du Colonel Fabien like a floating, futuristic ship. Architect Oscar Niemeyer designed the building in the late nineteen sixties to express transparency and collective ambition. When the construction crew broke ground, they discovered a hidden seventeenth-century plaster quarry deep underground. Workers spent months filling the massive, unstable voids beneath the site before they could finally pour the foundation for the tower.