It is a city so protective of its romantic skyline that skyscrapers have been banned in the historic centre for more than 30 years.

But on Monday Paris unveiled plans for a vast glass-enveloped office block that will become its tallest commercial building and loftiest construction since the Eiffel tower was inaugurated in 1889.

The "Phare," or lighthouse, is designed by Californian architect Thom Mayne.

Echoing London's famous "Gherkin," it is a gently sloping eco-friendly glass construction complete with wind-turbines on its roof, that will be the centrepiece of an ambitious overhaul of the La Defense area on the city's western outskirts.

Mayne's design was selected from proposals from10 famous architects including Norman Foster and Rem Koolhaas.

Once described as Paris's "mini-Manhattan," La Defense is one of Europe's biggest purpose-built business districts, built by Franois Mitterrand in 1989 to mark the bicentenary of the revolution.

Other projects built as part of Mitterrand's "Grands Travaux" developments included the Louvre's glass pyramid and the National Library.

But recently, the somewhat bleak La Defense has begun planning a new generation of high-rises to compete with new urban business quarters in Moscow, Madrid and Amsterdam. Around a fifth of the area's buildings are expected to be redeveloped.

The overhaul reflects worries that Paris has been losing business to rival cities including London and Milan and offers a chance to create a tower to match developments like Foster's glass Swiss Re building in the City of London, nicknamed the "Gherkin".

At 300 metres high, the "Phare" will be the first building to approach Gustav Eiffel's tower, which was originally 300 metres tall, but now soars a further 24 metres with its aerial.

A human element

"It's about an icon, and one of the major buildings in Paris," Mayne told reporters.

"There's a fluidity, a sensuousness, a softness to the form as it reaches to the sky," he said, adding he wanted the building to have a human element and describing its asymmetric twist which swells out over an elevated lobby in the lower portion before tapering off to a thicket of wind turbines.

Mayne said he wanted the Phare to be "a prototype for a green building," with the wind farm generating energy for the tower's heating and cooling for five months of the year and a movable "double skin" cutting the heat from direct sunlight through the windows.

At a cost of 900 million euros (US$1.2 billion), the building, which will offer 130,000 square metres of office space, is due to be completed in 2012.

Builder Unibail's Chief Executive Guillaume Poitrinal said the project showed private sector developers were just as capable as the public sector of creating landmark buildings, even if the Phare is dwarfed in height by mega developments in Asia.

"It's a real symbol of modernity but it's not a record tower, we're not trying to go to 800 metres. The idea is to have something which is modern and iconic rather than just high," he said.

But just as the Eiffel tower was initially described by the author Guy de Maupassant as "an odious tower of extreme bad taste", the French capital is braced for a backlash.

The newspaper Le Monde warned yesterday that a "hatred for concrete" and fear of high buildings was still common among Parisians traumatised by the 210 metre-tall 1970s monstrosity, Tour Montparnasse.

Source: China Daily