Les Olympiades

Les Olympiades stands as a stark departure from the stone facades and narrow streets typically associated with Paris. Built between 1969 and 1974, this district consists of over a dozen concrete towers rising more than one hundred meters into the sky. It represents the most extensive urban planning project in the city since the nineteenth-century transformations led by Baron Haussmann. The chief architect, Michel Holley, designed the complex on a concept of vertical zoning, where the ground level is reserved for traffic and parking while pedestrians circulate on a massive, elevated concrete esplanade eight meters above the streets.