MODERN PARIS: LA DEFENSE, VIRTUAL PANORAMAS BY LAURENT THION
by Michelle Bienias
French photographer Laurent Thion, of www.ecliptique.com, is amassing a spectacular collection of fullscreen VRs of Paris’ futuristic business district, La Défense. In September 2003, Thion, although a longtime resident of Paris, visited the area for the first time and says, “the absence of city traffic gives this unusual area a feeling of beauty and calm. It is the great multitude of buildings and the multiple pedestrian walkways that give the district originality and transforms it into a gigantic labyrinth devoid of stress.” The name ‘Defense’ originates from the monument ‘La Défense de Paris’, which was erected in 1883 to commemorate the war of 1870. In 1951 the Defense site was chosen as a modern office center and plans were in place to build two rows of skyscrapers of equal height but these plans went awry and the result is a mix of office towers of differing heights. The height of these towers, particularly the tallest, the GAN tower (200m), caused a public outcry as they affected the view of the Arc de Triomphe from the Etoile. Today 140,000 people work and 30,000 people live in La Défense. The district isn’t in Paris proper but far to the west, beyond the rich bourgeois neighborhood in Neuilly, in what was Paris’ light-industrial belt. What makes it unique is the fact that the whole concrete slab on which this mini city is built is a car-free zone; roads, parking and subway links are all underground. The main axis of La Défense lines up with the Pyramid in the Louvre, the Obelisk at Concorde, and the Arc de Triomphe at Etoile. The Grande Arche was built at La Defense’s western end. With buildings such as the CNIT and the Grande Arche, the architecture of La Défense is definitely futuristic. Over 1,000 major blue chip companies have chosen to set up their head offices here. La Défense also houses one of the largest shopping centers in Europe, the Quatre Temps with over 250 shops. The promenade on the square exhibits contemporary sculptures by famous artists such as Miro, Takis and Calder (see his two-story red-steel spider, ‘Grand stabile rouge’). There is also Raymond Moretti’s ‘Cheminée d'aération’, a 30 m parking chimney with coloured glass fibre and Bernar Venet’s ‘Double Ligne Indéterminée’, or Two Indeterminate Lines (1988).  Grande Arche
The Danish architect Otto Von Spreckelsen designed the Grande Arche de La Defense. He died in 1987, two years before the Arch was completed for the 200th anniversary of the 1789 French revolution. One of Mitterrand’s Grand Projects, a 15 billion franc program to build a series of modern monuments, the Grande Arche was to be a 20th century version of the 1810 Arc de Triomphe. It is actually a 35-story cube-shaped office building containing 95,000 square meters of office space. The Grande Arche is a white, 106-meter high cube with a pre-stressed concrete frame covered with glass and Carrara marble from Italy. The middle part is left open and the sides of the cube contain offices. A glass elevator whisks people up through the Arche’s interior space to the huge roof for a view of the city center. The Arche is slightly asymmetrical, rotated six-degrees off center of the axis, which was not part of the original design but done so that the piles supporting the structure could avoid the network of tunnels under the site. Tour EDF
165 m, 40 floors, completed in 2001. A conical shape is carved into the building’s base up to the 26th floor. The architectural firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners designed the elliptical form of the tower with a façade clad in alternating bands of stainless steel and reflective glass panels.Shoot Details:
Laurent Thion (www.ecliptique.com) used a Coolpix 5000 with WC-E68 optical complement and homemade head. Contrast optimization is corrected with Photoshop, and for theses panoramics, the mounting was doing with Realviz Stitcher.Laurent Thion created his first panorama around the age of thirteen and has now been photographing landscapes for 25 years. “Seeing the first panoramics on panoramas.dk and VRMAG re-triggered the panoramic bug in me and I decided to devote myself to it seriously for the last year and a half. It is the ‘absolute’ aspect of a cubic panorama that fascinates me, and also the fact that the spectator has free access to it,” Thion says. He has perfected his own panoramic head and his work has focused on managing and controlling the point of view, along with light and contrast. Thion cites Hans Nyberg, Jook Leung and Peter Murphy as photographers who have impressed him with their artistic and technical references. For more information on some of these buildings visit www.galinsky.com For more panos by Laurent Thion, see Tomb of Dom Perignon and visit Thion's website, www.ecliptique.com.
Email: Laurent-thion@ecliptique.com
| 
