Contemporary Buildings in Paris

France ows many of its most attractive and successful contemporary buildings in Paris to the vanity of its presidents. For centuries France's leaders have sought to immortalise themselves by erecting huge, public edifices - known as grands projets - in the capital, and the recent past have been no different. The late president Georges Pompidou commissioned the once reviled but now beloved Centre Beaubourg (Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, 1977), later renamed the Centre Pompidou, in which the architects - in order to keep the exhibitions halls as spacious and uncluttered as possible - put the building's insides outside!

Pompidou's successor, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, was instrumental in transforming the derelict Gare d'Orsay train station into the glorious Musee d'Orsay, a design carried out by the Italian architect Gaeltana Aulenti in 1986. But Francois Mitterrand, with his decided preference for the modern, surpassed them both with a dozen or so monumental projects in Paris.

Since the early 1980s, Paris has been the construction of such structures as IM Pei's controversal Grande Pyramide, a glass pyramid (1993) that serves as the main entrance to the hitherto sacrosanct (and untouchable) Louvre and an architectural cause célèbre in the late 1980s; the city's second opera house, the tile-clad Opéra Bastille, designed by Carlos Ott; the Danish architect Johann-Otto von Sprekelsen's monumental Grande Arche de la Défense, which opened in 1989; the delightful Conservatoire de Paris of the Cité de la Musique, which was designed by Christian de Portzamparc (1990 & 1994) and serves as a sort of gateway from the city to the whimsical Parc de la Vilette, with its wonderful museums, concert venues and other attractions; Patrick Berger's twinned Grandes serres, at the main entrance of the Parc André Citroen built in 1992; the ministery of finance designed by Paul Chemetov and Borja Huidobro in 1990, with its striking 'pier' overhanging the Seine in Bercy; and the four glass towers of Dominique Perrault's Bibliothèque Nationale de France, which opened in 1995.

One of the most beautiful and successful of the late-20th-century modern buildings in Paris is the Institut du Monde Arabe, a highly praised structure that opened in 1987 and successfully mixes modern and traditional arab and western elements. It was designed by Jean Nouvel, France's leading and arguably most talented architect.

Not everything new, different and/or monumental that has appeared in the past two decades has been a government undertaking, however. The vast majority of the buildings in La Défense, Paris' skycraper district on the Seine to the west of the city center, are privately owned and house some 1500 companies, including the head offices of more than a dozen of France's top corporations. Unfortunately, most of the skyscrapers here are impersonal and forgettable 'lipstick tubes' and 'upended shoeboxes' with the exception of the twin-towered Coeur Défense designed by Jean-Paul Viguier (2001) and, diagonally opposite, the elongated oven-shaped Tour EDF (Cobb &Pei, 2001), which appears to undulate in the breeze that forever whips across place de la Défense. It's a triumphal solution to a relatively small space and as attractive a stainless steel and glass skyscraper as you'll find anywhere.

Thoses wanting to learn more about Paris' contemporary architecture should visit the Pavillon de l'Arsenal, 21 boulevard Morland, 4e), which is the city's town-planning and architectural center and has both a permanent collection called 'Paris: The Making of a City' and rotating exhibits.