Glass office towers ring a raised esplanade over a sunken ring road, closed at one end by the Grande Arche.
What La Défense looks like
Glass office towers of thirty to fifty storeys stand around a raised paved esplanade that runs from the to the roundabout. sits partway along that line, its triangular concrete shell resting on three points 218 metres apart with no columns underneath. Most of the towers carry glass curtain walls.
An orbital motorway and the RER, metro and tram lines that serve the district run underneath the esplanade, so the paved surface at plaza level carries no car traffic. The ring road rises briefly into an underpass on , signed for Neuilly sur Seine and the district centre. Flagstone paving covers roughly 310,000 square metres across the deck above. Stairs, escalators and glass canopies over the station entrances break up that surface.
stands at the Courbevoie end, 231 metres and fifty two storeys. Its glass exterior dates from a re-cladding finished in 2011. Tour CBX is reached by the Passerelle des Reflets footbridge. It has one straight face and one curved face under a sloped roof, breaking from the flat tops most of the district's towers carry.
L'Araignée Rouge (The Red Spider), a steel sculpture by Alexander Calder, stands partway along the esplanade. A bronze fountain group marks the plaza closer to the Grande Arche, and rows of trees in raised planters break up the paving between the two.
Shot in La Défense
Jean-Luc Godard shot Alphaville here in 1965, using the newly built Esso Tower as part of his future city. The tower came down in 1993, after thirty years standing. Nothing of it remains to visit today. For D'Argent et de Sang, Canal+'s crime series shot inside Tour CBX and on the Passerelle des Reflets, the footbridge that crosses to the esplanade.
D'Argent et de Sang (Of Money and Blood), 2023
D'Argent et de Sang filmed scenes inside Tour CBX and on the adjoining Passerelle des Reflets footbridge. The Canal+ series also shot on the Passerelle d'Alsace and in Place des Reflets, the plaza the two footbridges meet at. Street View
Canary Wharf's glass office towers and raised pedestrian crossings over the Docklands Light Railway give it a similar scale and a similar separation of pedestrians from traffic below. Canary Wharf's paving reads redder than La Défense's grey flagstone and its towers run lower overall, so wide shots favour the newer glass blocks around One Canada Square. Try searching glass office towers now.
The European Quarter's ring of modern office towers around the Schuman roundabout matches La Défense's scale and its mix of glass and stone corporate facades. Brussels keeps more street level traffic in frame than La Défense's traffic free esplanade, so shots need tighter framing to keep passing cars out of shot. Try searching modern office towers now.
Bankenviertel in Frankfurt, Germany
Frankfurt's Bankenviertel clusters glass curtain wall towers of a similar height within a few blocks, one of the closer European matches for a dense corporate skyline. Frankfurt's towers stand on ordinary streets rather than a raised traffic free plaza, so a wide shot at ground level gives the difference away immediately. Try searching glass curtain wall towers now.
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