Paris: Flower Tower





This project by Edouard Francois, dubbed the ‘Flower Tower’ has generated quite a lot of press. It is a cool idea and serves many functions from heating and cooling to softening the forms of the surrounding buildings From the pictures, it is striking. From in person, well, it left something to be desired. It seems to be the perfect building for pictures and selling as an image. The architect described it as an extension of the park. But, there is not much more to a whole bunch of homogenous plants on the side of a very average building. Wouldn’t it have been much more attractive it people were actually able to grow their own thing? Think of the visual image of that! Plus, it makes the balcony space very small and obscures most people’s views. To me, it takes away that one exterior zone in which so many Parisians have control over. Additionally, something was crazy with the concrete. I hope it wasn’t intentional, but it looked horrible. I don’t remember seeing that in any of the published photos. I kind of think that when they realized the concrete was so bad, they have to think of a cheap and easy way to hide it, so why not with plants? I am personally more interested in another scheme of his...

The flower tower is part of the redevelopment of 17th arrondissment where each building was designed by a different architect offering an interesting language of new buildings.

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