Living High: Trinity Tower, Paris La Defense

Located in the futuristic business district La Defense of Paris, Trinity is a 32-storey office tower, built ex nihilo on a concrete slab poured above a seven-lane roadway as a major feat of civil engineering. Designed by Paris-based Cro&Co Architecture, it provides 3,500 square metres of landscaped public space and links the previously disconnected neighbourhoods within La Defense. Diverging from traditional office building design, Trinity is a unique high-rise conceived to facilitate open interaction with its environment, and to enable new forms of working through its shared spaces, terraces and balconies, and an accessible rooftop. It marks a break with the inward-looking buildings that have predominated in La Defense so far and that are indifferent to their surroundings. Trinity offers truly habitable heights with its generous public and semi-public spaces, distinguishing it from other high-rises designed to maximise real-estate returns. This book, published in collaboration with the Paris-based agency Metropolis, shows how the Trinity project's different views were made, the iterations that led to a system where vision connects, assembles and brings together. It reveals the elements involved in making these various views, destined to disappear as construction advanced. And it explores the tension between these hidden elements and the views that they form.