Fragments of FranceOn the edge of the ring road, the two skyscrapers designed by architect Jean Nouvel are shaking up a rapidly changing part of town and the perception of the inhabitants of the 13th arrondissement and Ivry-sur-Seine.
Clémence does not tell the whole truth to her daughters about the reality of her life in Paris. The house was still sleeping when it boarded the 6:19 am train in the north of Val-d’Oise, towards the capital. Faces and outfits change as the stations pass by. “At 6 o’clock, we meet the workers and people who prepare for other people’s day. I am with them. When you arrive in Paris, it’s another world. “ Change at Gare de Lyon, line 14, library exit, in the heart of 13e arrondissement, ZAC Rive gauche; it’s not quite seven o’clock. It is at this moment that she sees them, these new towers at the foot of which she is working.
They are two. A large (180 meters), a small (125 meters). The one massive, the second more refined. But some say they see only one, the highest, the one with the bowed head. The view changes depending on whether they arrive from the south of the ring road, whether they plague the traffic jams of the A4, or whether they observe them as neighbors from their balcony, in Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne) .
At 43, Clémence, who grew up in the northern suburbs of Paris, and who prefers to remain anonymous, likes them, these two towers, whose work is ending. She sees it as a symbol of economic success. “It’s a bit like Defense”, the ” New York “ of her 15-20 years, where she went hanging out with her friends imagining that one day she would look like “These chic and proud people”.
“Mom is a consultant and works to strengthen the image of a chocolate brand on social networks”, tells her daughters the ex-teenager who became a mother. Mom actually earns the minimum wage in a tea room by serving espresso to workers in the neighborhood, waffles topped with chocolate to families. And soon coffee lattes at 2.50 euros to some 9,400 employees of the Banque Populaire Caisse d’Epargne (BPCE) group and its investment subsidiary Natixis, who will occupy these two buildings signed Jean Nouvel. The most imposing, 39 floors, is the tallest building erected in Paris since the Montparnasse tower in 1973.
“Here, it is transitory”, insists Clémence, talking about her work. Her parents arrived from Congo-Kinshasa in the early 1980s, she was not 2 years old. A father driver, a typist mother. “It’s a successful immigration. All my sisters have a bac + 5 ”, she judges. Why his school of communication, “Where do most of the CNews journalists come from?”, would she not open other doors for him? “It tore my heart to come back to the neighborhood, she confides. I frequented the François-Mitterrand library coming from Villiers-le-Bel when I was preparing my master’s degree in info-com. “
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