TOUR TESTIMONIO | Bechu + Associés

Located at the eastern entrance to the Principality, this mixed use skyscraper project lays claim to being a vertical urban landscape as well as a landmark. Its steep site will symbolically create a link between the city’s upper and lower districts as well as between water, earth, rock, plant life and those living there. While reaching up towards the sky, the architecture is also deeply rooted into the rocky ground, much like an “inhabited tree”, drawing its energy from below in the same way as the banyan trees breaking through the stones of the abandoned temples of Angkor.

The first four office levels reached along Avenue de la Princesse-Grace. A school rises up a further four levels to find itself on the same height as Boulevard d’Italie. The skyscraper’s various halls are also connected: that for the crèche on the 1st floor, that for the 48 State-owned apartments. A fascinating protective carbon and ETFE* grid partially shades them from the sun much in the same way as the luxuriant nature reaching up from the base of the skyscraper.

This perfectly earthquake-proof design, this half fossilised inhabited arborescence or stalagmitic habitat partially colonised by plants and trees, incorporates into the landscape through a powerful architectural gesture that projects the Principality into the modern world while placing emphasis on the site itself. The eco-responsibility it advocates fully integrates the concept of a programmatic and social mix.