Montparnasse Tower
— — the one rooftop Paris looks back from.
Not only on a wall.
“A single black tower above the south side of Paris, two hundred and ten metres of dark glass set down in 1973 in a city that has never quite forgiven it. The observation deck on the fifty-ninth floor holds the view nothing else in Paris can hold — the Eiffel Tower from above, the long sweep of the Seine, the white dome of Sacré-Cœur on the far hill. From the studio, the picture is the tower as the city sees it, framed by its own skyline.
Montparnasse Tower, 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.
Tour Montparnasse stands in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, on the south side of the Seine, above the Montparnasse-Bienvenüe metro station and Gare Montparnasse. The building rises 210 metres over 59 floors and was completed in 1973 to designs by Eugène Beaudouin, Urbain Cassan, and Louis Hoym de Marien. It was the tallest building in France until 2011 and remains the tallest in the city proper. Public outcry over its scale led the city to ban high-rises in central Paris in 1977.
The tower is a single dark monolith of bronze-tinted glass over a steel frame, set on a plinth above the Montparnasse rail terminal. Its silhouette is unornamented — a flat-topped slab without setbacks or crown — which is what made it so divisive in a city of mansard roofs and limestone façades. A renovation programme announced in 2017 plans to reclad the building in a paler, more transparent skin by the late 2020s, though the form will be kept.
The 56th-floor indoor observatory and the 59th-floor open-air rooftop are accessible to the public. A single high-speed lift reaches the 56th floor in about 38 seconds, the fastest in Europe at the building's opening. The rooftop carries the most-cited line about the tower: that the view from it is the best in Paris because the tower itself is the one thing missing from it. Hours run year-round, evenings included; sunset slots sell out first.