1 · Position
The CNIT was built between 1955 and 1958: an equilateral triangle 220 metres a side, its enormous concrete shell resting on only three points. Concrete was poured without stopping, day and night, so it would not crack. The vault had to be lifted off its formwork by ten jacks, each able to raise 3,000 tonnes — the weight of the Eiffel Tower. De Gaulle and Malraux inaugurated it on 12 September 1958, ten days before the last third of the shell had even been struck, and three days after the decree creating EPAD.
2 · ⚑ The mandate that would not end
EPAD was given thirty years, to 1988. It was extended to 1992, then 2007, then 2010, then 2015. A body created to finish a district in three decades took nearly six. The Library records it because every entry in this group is sold on a completion date, and this is the oldest of them with the longest record.
3 · Why it is in the Library
It is the earliest district in this group and set the terms for all of them: pedestrians above, cars below, per the Athens Charter; offices around an esplanade; a shopping centre, then hotels, then residents. The Grande Arche closes the axis from the Louvre through the Arc de Triomphe, four kilometres away, and was won in a national competition by a Danish architect who had built four churches. Every district since — Canary Wharf, King's Cross, Downtown Dubai — is arguing with a decision taken here in 1958.
4 · Candour
EPAD acquired land, expropriated property and relocated the people living on it; the district records that plainly and the Library repeats it. Nothing of the old quarter survives except a single statue, moved to a corner of the site, stored in the Neuilly cemetery, and put back in 1983 slightly east of where it had stood. The 1973 crisis emptied the offices and four catastrophic years followed, with the district's future in doubt until 1978.