Italie 13

You are walking through the center of an ambitious and controversial chapter of Parisian history known as the Italie 13 project. In the nineteen sixties, city planners viewed the older, industrial sections of this area as insalubrious and badly built. They devised a plan to transform the neighborhood into a modern, vertical city inspired by the high-rise theories of Le Corbusier. Architects Raymond Lopez and Michel Holley designed a landscape dominated by towering concrete blocks intended to house thousands, with pedestrian esplanades separated from the noise and danger of street-level traffic.