La Défense
— — the city Paris built to look forward.
Not only on a wall.
“The business quarter that grew up west of the Arc de Triomphe, set on a long pedestrian esplanade that ends under the Grande Arche. The towers are glass and steel, the plaza is granite, and the open-air sculpture collection sits between them as though it had always been there. On a clear afternoon the Grande Arche frames the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre in a single straight sightline. People cut across on their way to a train. from the studio
La Défense, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
La Défense is the principal business district of the Paris metropolitan area, straddling the communes of Courbevoie, Puteaux, and Nanterre in Hauts-de-Seine, about three kilometres west of the city limits. Development began in 1958 under the public planning authority EPAD, and the quarter now holds roughly 3.5 million square metres of office space across more than seventy towers. The pedestrian esplanade, raised over road and rail, runs about one kilometre from the Pont de Neuilly to the Grande Arche, completing the western extension of the Axe historique that begins at the Louvre.
The Grande Arche de la Défense, inaugurated in 1989 for the bicentennial of the French Revolution, was designed by Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen as a near-perfect cube clad in Carrara marble and grey granite, standing 110 metres tall. It sits at the western anchor of the historical axis aligned with the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre Pyramid. Below it the older CNIT vault from 1958, an early thin-shell concrete structure, spans 218 metres between three points of support. Both buildings frame an esplanade scattered with works by Calder, Miró, and César.
The quarter is reached most easily by RER A or Métro line 1 to the La Défense – Grande Arche station, a fifteen-minute ride from the centre of Paris. The esplanade is open at all hours and free to walk; the rooftop of the Grande Arche reopened to the public in 2017 with a paid lift to a 110-metre observation deck. Photographs of the long axial sightline back toward the Arc de Triomphe come out best in late afternoon, when the lowering sun lights the granite plaza and the glass façades take on warmer tones.