Heart Defense (links) The low-rise section east of the towers
Cœur Défense is an office building in La Défense, the business district of Paris. The building, designed by French architect Jean-Paul Viguier, dates back to 2001 and has the largest floor space for office use in Europe.
The whole consists of two towers of 161 meters high (with basement floors 180 meters), 25 meters apart, connected by a third building. The whole is flanked by a three-storey eight-storey building. The total area is 350,000 m², of which 190,000 m² are office space. The shape, with two slim volumes, was chosen to provide the ten thousand workers in the building with daylight. Until then, thick towers like the Tour Areva were common, eliminating the lack of light in the center of the tower with artificial light.
Cœur Défense was built in 2001 by Bouygues, commissioned by Unibail. On the spot until 1993 the Tour Esso, the first office tower on La Défense, was demolished. Unibail bought the land for 1997 for 1 billion francs from a group of French investors, including BNP Paribas, GAN and Société Générale), who bought it for the triple in 1992. Due to the real estate crisis of the nineties, the group failed to develop the site.
Cœur Défense was delivered in June 2001, at a time when the office market began to resume. In March 2007, the building was bought by Lehman Brothers for 2.11 billion euros from Unibail and Whitehall, the real estate fund of Goldman Sachs. Externe link
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