La Grande Arche de La Defense

PARIS WALK | La Défense Promenade from Bassin Takis to Grande Arche | France

A first-person perspective Paris walk tour of Paris La Défense from Bassin Takis to Grande Arche de la Defense.

See all the sights as Watched Walker (yes, I’m talking about myself in the third person) takes us on a walking tour through the streets of Paris, featuring La Défense. The tour begins by Bassin Takis (right above Esplanade de La Défense metro station) and continues along the pedestrianised promenade to Grande Arche de la Defense, where the tour concludes.

Please note, construction work was taking place close to Grande Arche, therefore, drilling and other loud noises can be heard.

Sights seen along the tour include Bassin Takis, ‘Le Moretti’ sculpture by Raymond Moretti, statue of ‘La Défense de Paris’ by Louis-Ernest Barrias, 'Araignée Rouge’ (Red Spider) sculpture by Alexander Calder, Les Quatre Temps and Cnit La Defense shopping centres, various architecture including skyscrapers, and Grande Arche de la Defense (Great Arch of Defense).

And in each video I've hidden a blinking eye, can you spot it? (It could appear more than once). In addition to the blinking eye, I've also added the Watched Walker logo to various scenes–it could be on buildings, vehicles or any other objects, so keep an eye out for it too!

Footage recorded August 2017.

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To The Top of Le Grande Arche, La Defense, Paris

La Grande Arche de la Défense, The Great Arc of the Defense; also La Grande Arche de la Fraternité) is a monument and building in the business district of La Défense and in the commune of Puteaux, to the west of Paris, France. It is usually known as the Arche de la Défense or simply as La Grande Arche. A 360 ft cube, La Grande Arche is part of the perspective from the Louvre to Arc de Triomphe. The distance from La Grande Arche to Arc de Triomphe is 2 1⁄2 miles.

A great national design competition was launched in 1982 as the initiative of French president François Mitterrand. Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen (1929–1987) and Danish engineer Erik Reitzel (1941-2012) designed the winning entry to be a late-20th-century version of the Arc de Triomphe: a monument to humanity and humanitarian ideals rather than military victories. The construction of the monument began in 1985. Spreckelsen resigned in July 1986 and ratified the transfer of all his architectural responsibilities to his associate, French architect Paul Andreu. Reitzel continued his work until the monument was completed in 1989.

The Arche is in the approximate shape of a cube with a width, height and depth of 360 ft; it has been suggested that the structure looks like a hypercube (a tesseract) projected onto the three-dimensional world. It has a prestressed concrete frame covered with glass and Carrara marble from Italy and was built by the French civil engineering company Bouygues.

La Grande Arche was inaugurated in July 1989, with grand military parades that marked the bicentennial of the French Revolution. It completed the line of monuments that forms the Axe historique running through Paris. The Arche is turned at an angle of 6.33° about the vertical axis. The most important reason for this turn was technical: with a métro station, an RER station, and a motorway all situated directly underneath the Arche, the angle was the only way to accommodate the structure's giant foundations. In addition, from an architectural point of view, the turn emphasizes the depth of the monument and is similar to the turn of the Louvre at the other end of the Axe historique.

In addition, the Arche is placed so that it forms a secondary axis with the two of the highest buildings in Paris at the time, the Tour Eiffel and the Tour Montparnasse.

The two sides of the Arche house government offices. The roof section was closed in 2010 following an accident without injury and opened again to the public in 2017 after seven years of renovation works. It features panoramic views of Paris and includes a restaurant and an exhibition area dedicated to photojournalism