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Paris, Nov 2, 2021 (AFP) -A spectacular new 42-floor pyramid-shaped skyscraper is set to be built in Paris after years of planning, a move the city's Greens denounced Tuesday as "catastrophic" and counter to climate pledges.
The Triangle Tower (Tour Triangle), to be built in the 15th district on the city's southwestern edge, is set to be finished in 2026 after winning financing from insurance giant Axa following years of delays. Work is due to start next year.
It will be a rare high-rise addition to the skyline within the inner city limits of the French capital, which prides itself on keeping its historic character intact in the face of rampant development elsewhere.
Designed by Swiss architects Herzog and Meuron, it will inevitably draw comparisons with the famous modern pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre museum in central Paris — though far larger and resembling a giant elongated wedge of Toblerone chocolate.
Green legislators on the Paris city council, who sit in coalition with Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, denounced the plan as a "climatic aberration" that should be abandoned.
This project for an "office tower 180 meters (590 feet) high and 92,000 square metres in area is anti-ecological and contrary to the commitments of the climate plan of the City of Paris," they said in a statement.
The Greens lamented the fact that the relaunch "incompatible with France's objective of halving its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030" had been announced "in the midst of the COP26" climate summit in Glasgow.
The tower has a "catastrophic" carbon footprint for both its construction and its operation, they added.
Hidalgo, currently in Glasgow for the COP26 summit, is standing for the Socialists in next year's presidential elections and is keen to burnish her credentials as an environmental campaigner who has moved to decrease traffic congestion in the city.
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