project tour triangle paris

Nouvelle silhouette dans la skyline parisienne, nouvelle mixité effervescente, nouvelle manière de travailler…

Triangle sera un lieu ouvert à tous

Le socle de Triangle est composé de commerces, de restaurants, et proposera des services de proximité tels que crèche, centre de santé, espaces culturels… Des espaces de conférence et de travail collaboratif permettront aux entreprises de rassembler leur écosystème dans des bureaux ouverts et accueillants. L’hôtel et l’observatoire, situés aux étages supérieurs, permettront à tous les Parisiens et aux visiteurs de la capitale de découvrir Paris et les communes avoisinantes sous un nouveau jour.

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Tour Triangle

The first Parisian skyscraper of the 21st century

The 180-metre high Tour Triangle has been designed to comply with the BREEAM Excellent (minimum) and HQE Exceptional environmental certifications, as well as the Effinergie label. The solutions implemented include geothermal systems, a district heating network and energy and heat recovery systems, as well as a bioclimatic façade and 1,000 m² of photovoltaic panels.

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW) has awarded BESIX the construction of the Tour Triangle in Paris, designed by the architects Herzog & De Meuron, winners of the prestigious Pritzker Prize.  The Tour Triangle will include office space, a conference centre, but also a health centre, a cultural centre, a crèche, a hotel and a restaurant. The building's carbon footprint will be controlled, in particular through the use of low-carbon materials, including a minimum of 50% concrete with reduced CO2 emissions, and recycled materials, in particular for the aluminium facades.

Engineering & Construction

The planning, logistics and construction methods have been developed by BESIX Engineering, the in-house design office of BESIX, in order to optimally reduce the impact on local mobility, the neighbourhood and the operation of the Parc des Expositions. BESIX Engineering will also carry out the execution studies for the structure and will provide support for those dedicated to the façade.  The tower, which will generate 5,000 direct and indirect jobs, will be completed in 2026. BESIX will work closely with the project management team appointed by URW: the engineering firms Setec and Egis, respectively in charge of the design studies for the structure and fluids, and Artelia as the execution project manager.

Project details

Project name

Offices, Hotels, Residential

Contract type

Paris, France

Stakeholder(s)

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW)

Building Period

2022 - 2026

Herzog & De Meuron

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307 Triangle

Paris, France

Project Description available in French and German

La Tour Triangle se perçoit tout d’abord à l’échelle métropolitaine de la ville de Paris. Situé Place de la Porte de Versailles, sa forme singulière offre des perceptions multiples et dynamiques. Sa silhouette varie en fonction du point depuis lequel on l’observe. D’une forme triangulaire reconnaissable à un profil de lame effilée, la Tour Triangle propose de multiples visages et apportera à la Place de la Porte de Versailles une grande visibilité depuis l’ensemble de la métropole.

A l’échelle de la Place de la Porte de Versailles, l’insertion de Triangle le long de l’avenue Ernest Renan, au cœur du Parc des Expositions et en retrait des bâtiments avoisinants, jouera un rôle important dans la réorganisation des flux et dans la perception de l’espace urbain. Triangle permettra de revitaliser l’axe historique émanant de la rue de Vaugirard reliant le 15ème arrondissement de Paris et les communes limitrophes d’Issy-les-Moulineaux et de Vanves. La calibration précise et spécifique de sa volumétrie favorise son insertion dans le tissu urbain et vise à limiter l’impact du bâtiment sur son environnement. Sa forme triangulaire a deux fonctions : elle préserve de généreux angles de vues du ciel pour les riverains et elle réduit, tel un cadran solaire, la projection d’ombres sur les bâtiments avoisinants. Triangle est conçu comme un morceau de ville que l’on aurait fait pivoter et placé verticalement. Sa programmation offre une grande mixité. Pour le visiteur, le projet est d’abord perçu depuis la Porte de Versailles où converge les réseaux des transports en commun. Le socle du bâtiment est ouvert à tous, la base de Triangle s’étire le long de l’avenue Ernest Renan. Le projet offrira une programmation riche tout en recréant un front de rue vivant. Une crèche, un centre de santé, un centre culturel, des restaurants, des cafés, des commerces permettrons de remettre le piéton au cœur d’un espace public pensé à son échelle et offrant les qualités d’une rue parisienne animée. La part belle est aussi faite aux mobilités douces avec l’intégration d’un parking de stationnent vélos et trottinettes de 880 places.

Un belvédère et un restaurant sont situés au plus haut de Triangle. Trois ascenseurs panoramique publiques relieront le rez-de-chaussée au sommet depuis lequel le visiteur découvrira des points de vue exceptionnels sur l’ensemble de la métropole. Un Hôtel a aussi été imaginé au cœur de Triangle. Localisé sur la façade Nord, ses 130 chambres trouveront place entre les niveaux 13 et 18 et disposeront de terrasses orientées vers Paris. L’hôtel offrira aussi un Skybar et un restaurant accessible à tous.

Triangle proposera à ses usagers des espaces de travail de grande qualité. Sa forme singulière lui permet de développer des plateaux généreux baignés de lumière naturelle. Le projet dispose d’une grande variété de typologies d’espaces. Des modes de circulation doux ont été pensés au sein de la tour grâce à l’intégration d’escaliers hélicoïdaux. Ces escaliers relient les étages entre eux évitant ainsi l’utilisation systématique des ascenseurs tout en favorisant les échanges entres les utilisateurs.

Triangle fait la démonstration qu’une grande mixité programmatique au sein d’une tour est possible. La conception de sa structure et de sa façade lui permette d’accueillir tout type d’usages et en font un projet fondamentalement flexible capable de s’adapter aux besoins présents et futurs.

La relation des usagers à l’environnement extérieur a aussi été privilégiée. L’enveloppe de Triangle intègre de multiples ouvrants qui permettrons aux utilisateurs de ventiler naturellement les bureaux. Un large éventail d’espaces extérieurs végétalisés et accessibles ont aussi été imaginés. Au Nord, la particularité d’une façade dessinée en gradins a permis l’insertion de terrasses orientées vers la ville et déployées en cascade. Ces terrasses seront accessibles depuis tous les étages. Elles deviendront de véritables espaces à vivre, aussi bien pour les utilisateurs quotidiens que pour les clients de l’hôtel, les visiteurs du Belvédère ou ceux du Restaurant panoramique. Au Sud, la géométrie de la façade a permis l’intégration de panneaux photovoltaïque. Installés sur toute la hauteur de Triangle, ils bénéficieront d’une orientation optimale pour la production d’énergie renouvelable. Enfin et à proximité de l’Avenue des loggias extérieures surplombent l’espace public. Intégrées sous la forme d’une découpe triangulaire précise de l’enveloppe en verre, elles favoriseront les interactions entre les utilisateurs de Triangle et l’activité de la rue.

En conclusion, Triangle permettra de recréer un espace urbain fort et animé Place de la Porte de Versailles. Il sera non seulement un nouveau vecteur entre le centre historique de Paris et l’agglomération comprise au sens large, mais aussi une silhouette exceptionnelle dans le système d’axes et de monuments de la ville, comme un signal au cœur du Parc des Expositions.

Herzog & de Meuron, 2021

Triangle ist zunächst im Kontext der Metropole Paris zu verstehen. Seine einzigartige Form – jene einer unregelmässigen Pyramide mit trapezförmiger Grundfläche – steht im Kontrast zum typischen Anblick, den ein klassischer, lediglich senkrecht in die Höhe gezogener Turm bieten würde. Sein spezielles Volumen verleiht Triangle vielfältige und dynamische Ansichten, die je nach Standpunkt des Betrachters variieren. So wird es zu einem aktiven Gestaltungselement der Skyline von Paris und sorgt dafür, dass die Place de la Porte de Versaille und das Messegelände von jedem Punkt der Stadt aus gut zu erkennen sein werden.

Im Bereich der Place de la Porte de Versailles wird das Einfügen eines symbolträchtigen und unverwechselbaren Gebäudes entlang der Avenue Ernest Renan, im Zentrum des Messegeländes, vom Platz selbst und den angrenzenden Gebäuden jedoch etwas zurückversetzt, eine wichtige Rolle für die Neuregelung des Verkehrsflusses und die Wahrnehmung des städtischen Raumes spielen und zugleich die historische Achse wiederbeleben, die das 15. Arrondissement mit den Agglomerationsgemeinden Issy-les-Moulineaux und Vanves verbindet. Die Feinkalibrierung des Volumens begünstigt seine Integration und ist darauf ausgerichtet, die Auswirkungen des Gebäudes auf sein Umfeld in Grenzen zu halten. Die dreieckige Form hat zwei Funktionen; sie erlaubt weiterhin grosszügige Ausblicke in den Himmel und reduziert – wie eine Sonnenuhr – den Schattenwurf auf die angrenzenden Gebäude. Triangle ist als in die Vertikale gekipptes Stück Stadt gedacht. Der Besucher nimmt das Projekt zunächst von der Place de la Porte de Versailles aus wahr, dem lokalen Knotenpunkt des öffentlichen Verkehrsnetzes. Der Sockel des Gebäudes steht allen offen und erstreckt sich vom Platz aus entlang der gesamten Avenue Ernest Renan, die dank ihren Geschäften und Dienstleistungsangeboten wieder wie eine belebte Pariser Strasse wirkt. Die zum Zentrum von Paris hin ausgerichtete Nordost-Achse beherbergt zwei in geneigtem Winkel angelegte Fahrstühle, die das Atrium im Sockel mit dem Panoramarestaurant oben im Turm verbinden. Der Besuch kann anschliessend in den höchsten Stockwerken des Triangle fortgesetzt werden, bis hin zur Aussichtsplattform, die atemberaubende Ausblicke auf die ganze Stadt bietet. Triangle wird dadurch mit zu den Sehenswürdigkeiten von Paris zählen. Der Bau lässt erneut einen starken und belebten städtischen Raum entstehen, die Place de la Porte de Versailles wird zu einem Bezugspunkt, der einen Panoramablick auf die Stadt bietet und selbst als bemerkenswertes Element im System der Achsen und Monumente der Stadt erscheint, ein Bauwerk mit Signalwirkung im Zentrum des Messegeländes.

Herzog & de Meuron, 2014

Bibliography

Gerhard Mack, Herzog & de Meuron: “ Herzog & de Meuron 2005-2007. The Complete Works. Volume 6. ” Edited by: Gerhard Mack. Basel, Birkhäuser, 2018.

Luis Fernández-Galiano (Ed.): “ Arquitectura Viva Monografias. Herzog & de Meuron 2013-2017. ” Vol. No. 191-192, Madrid, Arquitectura Viva SL, 12.2016.

Luis Fernández-Galiano (Ed.): “ Arquitectura Viva Monografías. Herzog & de Meuron 2005-2013. ” Vol. No. 157/158, Madrid, Arquitectura Viva SL, 09.2012.

Fernando Márquez Cecilia; Richard Levene (Eds.): “ El Croquis. Herzog & de Meuron 2005-2010. Programme, Monument, Landscape. Programa, Monumento, Paisaje. ” Vol. No. 152/153, Madrid, El Croquis, 2010.

Herzog & de Meuron: “Project Triangle in Paris by Herzog & de Meuron.” In: Nobuyuki Yoshida (Ed.). “Architecture and Urbanism. Sustainable Architecture in Germany.” Vol. No. 459, Tokyo, A+U Publishing Co., Ltd., 12.2008. p. 7.

“Una Cuña de Cristal a las Puertas de París.” In: Luis Fernández-Galiano (Ed.). “Arquitectura Viva.” Vol. No. 120, Madrid, Arquitectura Viva, 2008. p. 7.

Herzog & de Meuron 2005-2007. The Complete Works. Volume 6

Herzog & de Meuron 2005-2007. Das Gesamtwerk. Band 6

Triangle, Paris

Presentation by Herzog & de Meuron Pavillon de l'Arsenal, Paris, France

Quel est le potentiel d’une architecture?

Lecture held by Jacques Herzog at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal to inaugurate the exhibition Triangle. Paris, France, 30 October 2014.

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Herzog & de Meuron’s Triangle Tower—Paris’s First New Skyscraper in Decades—Gets Greenlit

By Katherine McGrath

After nearly five years of intense back-and-forth deliberation, French courts have finally greenlit the Herzog & de Meuron –designed Triangle Tower in Paris. Located in the southern 15th arrondissement by Porte de Versailles on the Périphérique, the boulevard that circles the city’s limits, this will be the city’s first new skyscraper built since the Tour de Montparnasse. Construction is expected to begin in 2020 and finish in time for the 2024 Paris Olympics.

The project, which was first unveiled in 2008 and is estimated to cost 500 million euros, has been met with fierce criticism by both locals who fear it will fundamentally change the fabric of the neighborhood and politicians who argue that the building’s irregular shape will require higher energy consumption. It has also been met with sharp criticism from Parisians who feel that it does nothing to address the larger problems they’re facing, including a lack of affordable housing, issues with public transport, and a decline in quality of life due to lack of policy.

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Construction had been pushed back multiple times after opposition by neighborhood groups including SOS Paris, France Nature Environment Île-de-France, and the Association for Harmonious Development of Porte de Versailles, who moved to retract the approval that was narrowly granted in 2015. The construction was set to continue until the building permit was revoked in April of 2017. But the court’s ruling on Monday found that the building permit was not, in fact, unlawful. “The mayor of Paris did not commit an error in assessing that the project is not likely to affect the neighborhood’s character or views,” the administrative court told Le Parisien .

“The Triangle Tower is a part of the new construction that is drawing the new Paris,” remarked Jean-Louis Missika, Paris’s deputy in charge of urbanism and architecture to the Agénce France Presse. At 42 stories tall, the triangular structure will be home to a hotel, a panoramic restaurant, a visitor’s center, a co-working space with accommodations for up to 5,000 workers, a health center, and a daycare, among other amenities. Herzog & de Meuron’s triangular structure offers different shapes depending on where it’s viewed from; sometimes appearing slender and pointed, other times strong and triangular.

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Work starts on environmentally ‘catastrophic’ Triangle Tower in Paris

At 180 metres tall, pyramid-shaped glass and steel skyscraper will be city’s third-highest building

Construction of a 42-floor, pyramid-shaped skyscraper began in Paris on Thursday despite local opposition and objections from environmentalists who have called the project “catastrophic”.

The Triangle Tower (Tour Triangle) will, at 180 metres (590ft), become the city’s third-highest building after the Eiffel Tower, completed in 1889, and the Montparnasse Tower, which opened in 1973.

High-rise additions are rare in 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 de Meuron, the Triangle Tower – which will resemble the shape of a giant wedge of Toblerone chocolate – is to be completed in 2026 at a cost of €660m (£555m), according to the developers, Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW).

The plan for the skyscraper was launched in 2008 and then approved in 2015 by Paris’s socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, against resistance from her Green party allies in city hall.

Hidalgo, who is standing in April’s French presidential election, has tried to burnish her credentials as an environmental campaigner, tackling traffic congestion in the city and favouring clean transport, especially bicycles.

The conservative mayor of the 15th district where the tower will stand, Philippe Goujon, is also against the project, telling AFP that “the neighbourhood will be devastated for several years”.

Already, he said, there was a constant flow of trucks and “four giant cranes” had been deployed.

The city’s Green legislators have denounced the tower as a “climatic aberration” that should be abandoned because of its “catastrophic carbon footprint”.

Paris prosecutors opened an investigation last June into possible favouritism over the lease of the land on which the tower is being built, after legal complaints from several associations fighting the project.

“How can you justify building a tower made of glass and steel, which needs huge amounts of energy, with 70,000 sq metres of office space, in Paris – a city that is already overflowing with offices?” the association “Collectif Contre La Tour Triangle” said.

The lease runs for 80 years and URW has agreed to pay city hall €2m a year for its duration.

About two-thirds of the tower’s 91,000 sq metres are to be used for office space, and there will also be a 130-room hotel, a childcare unit and shops.

URW, which also runs the shopping complex Les Halles in the heart of the city , has said that the building could be repurposed in the future as needs changed and that its carbon footprint was low.

Feeling the financial pain from two years of Covid restrictions, URW reduced its share in the operation to 30% and brought in the insurer Axa to share the cost.

Stock market investors welcomed the start of building work on Thursday, with URW stock rising nearly 6% on the Paris Bourse.

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Herzog & de Meuron’s Tour Triangle is moving forward, dividing Parisians

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Wedge Issue

[Editor’s note: Construction on the 42-story Triangle Tower began today , February 10, 2022, evidently surviving the community pushback described below.]

After more than a decade of financing snags, legal scuffles, and more than a soupçon   of backlash, initial work on the Herzog & de Meuron -designed Tour Triangle ( Triangle Tower ) is set to commence by the end of this year at a site near Parc des Expositions de Porte de Versailles in the 15th arrondissement of Paris . However, last-ditch efforts to block the project are underway.

While not exceedingly colossal at just shy of 600 feet, the 42-story pyramidal glass skyscraper is tall for Paris and would be the first high-rise tower to be constructed within the boundaries of Boulevard Périphérique, the ring road that encircles central Paris, since Tour Montparnasse. Also located within the 15th arrondissement in the southwest of the city, Tour Montparnasse was similarly met with widespread derision when completed in 1973 for being completely out of scale with the rest of the city and remains an object of scorn to this day. (Meanwhile, modern skyscrapers abound in La Défense, a sprawling, purpose-built business district located just outside of Paris city limits.)

In 2019, Tour Triangle’s developer, Unibail-Rodamco, scored a major victory when an administrative court upheld the lawfulness of a building permit first issued in April 2015, rejecting two appeals that had been filed against the nearly $800 million project. Now, the highly contentious vertical development, which is set to include offices, a luxury hotel, retail, and conference center, has finally secured financial backing from insurance giant AXA and can move forward. It’s worth noting that Tour Triangle, which would also include childcare and health/wellness facilities along with a cultural center, isn’t set to be completed until 2026—that’s two years after the Paris-hosted Summer Olympic games. The original project timeline had it opening well ahead of the 2024 Summer Olympics as Expo Porte de Versailles, the largest exhibition center in Paris, is serving as a venue for the games.

“We designed Triangle for Paris and Parisians,” said Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in a joint statement. “What we want to achieve most with this building is that it should be open to everyone and include the entire community.”

While Tour Triangle’s height—when completed it would rise as the third tallest building within Paris city limits behind the 690-foot-tall Tour Montparnasse and 1,063-foot-tall Eiffel Tower—has been at the center of the controversy, its trapezoidal form has also garnered unfavorable reactions. Agence France-Presse noted that while comparisons to I.M. Pei’s Louvre Pyramid are inevitable, the planned tower’s semblance to “a giant elongated wedge of Toblerone chocolate” might be more appropriate.

Speaking to The Telegraph , a British daily newspaper that by now is an old hat at covering skyscrapers that faintly resemble food,  Paris-based art historian Didier Rykner likened Tour Triangle not to chocolate, but to cheese:

“It’s like a big piece of brie in the sky that can be seen from everywhere … and that’s a problem,” he explained. “I prefer the real cheese.”

Meanwhile, the city’s left-leaning political factions have been left unusually divided on the project. While the Green Party has rallied against Tour Triangle and preemptively declared it as an “ecological aberration,” Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s center-left Socialist Party (PS) has avoided taking such a hardline stance and is largely supportive, noting that it will “be an asset for the economic development and influence of the capital” and generate “more than 5,000 jobs during its construction” per The Telegraph .

On the opposing side, Christine Nedelec, the president of the campaign group SOS Paris , explained to The Telegraph that Tour Triangle has “been a scandal from the beginning” and that constructing the building would be an “an economical and ecological disaster.”

SOS Paris pointed out that building the tower would require the use of three to four times more concrete and steel than a typical new Parisian building and that its irregular shape would significantly increase its energy consumption. “It’s like a boiler that needs to be on full blast at all times,” said Nedelec.

While opponents have been quick to label Tour Triangle as an environmental nightmare, its developers have touted its green bona fides, noting in a press statement that the tower will “incorporate the highest environmental construction standards targeting HQE Exceptional and BREEAM minimum Excellent certifications while offering best in class conventional energy consumption and a carbon emissions trajectory in line with the Paris climate agreement objectives.”

As for the final efforts to slow or altogether block Tour Triangle from moving forward, the Green Party is hoping that the results of a preliminary criminal investigation into allegations of favoritism by Hidalgo’s office toward Viparis, the company that manages the expo site at the Porte de Versailles, will put an end to Tour Triangle once and for all.

In a separate move aiming to at least temporarily kneecap the development, Philippe Goujon, the conservative mayor of the 15th arrondissement, recently announced his plans to present a formal request for the project’s postponement at the next convening of the Council of Paris from November 16–19. Per local media reports , Goujon, who has long been opposed to the project, has said that “the arguments put forward in 2008 to justify the construction” of Tour Triangle by former Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë are now “obsolete” and that the development “no longer meets the needs of companies that the Covid-19 crisis and the development of teleworking are leading to rethink.”

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BESIX builds the Tour Triangle in Paris

Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW) has awarded BESIX the construction of the Tour Triangle in Paris, designed by the architects Herzog & De Meuron, winners of the prestigious Pritzker Prize.

The 180-metre high Tour Triangle has been designed to comply with the BREEAM Excellent (minimum) and HQE Exceptional environmental certifications, as well as the Effinergie label. The solutions implemented include geothermal systems, a district heating network and energy and heat recovery systems, as well as a bioclimatic façade and 1,000 m² of photovoltaic panels.

Pierre Sironval, Deputy CEO of BESIX Group : “BESIX is very proud to build the Tour Triangle, a technically, logistically and architecturally demanding building. We are particularly grateful for the trust placed in us by Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield in awarding us the construction of this building. It joins the prestigious buildings built by BESIX around the world, including the Grand Egyptian Museum in Cairo and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’s tallest tower.”

The planning, logistics and construction methods have been developed by BESIX Engineering, the in-house design office of BESIX, in order to optimally reduce the impact on local mobility, the neighbourhood and the operation of the Parc des Expositions. BESIX Engineering will also carry out the execution studies for the structure and will provide support for those dedicated to the façade.

Andres Penaloza, Director of BESIX France : “The Tour Triangle is the latest addition to our ongoing projects in the Paris region. In perfect collaboration with URW, our engineering and operational teams have worked meticulously to optimise the construction process and deliver the high quality required by our client. All our teams are now mobilised.”

The Tour Triangle will include office space, a conference centre, but also a health centre, a cultural centre, a crèche, a hotel and a restaurant. The building’s carbon footprint will be controlled, in particular through the use of low-carbon materials, including a minimum of 50% concrete with reduced CO2 emissions, and recycled materials, in particular for the aluminium facades. The tower site will also offer 100,000 hours of social integration in partnership with EPEC, the Ensemble Paris Emploi Compétences association.

The tower, which will generate 5,000 direct and indirect jobs, will be completed in 2026. BESIX will work closely with the project management team appointed by URW: the engineering firms Setec and Egis, respectively in charge of the design studies for the structure and fluids, and Artelia as the execution project manager.

The Tour Triangle will be the third high-rise building built by BESIX in Paris. It joins the Dexia (CBX) and Carpe Diem towers in the La Défense district. The Carpe Diem Tower was the first tower to be awarded both HQE and Leed certification and the first Leed Platinum certified tower in France.

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Tour Triangle | Herzog and De Meuron

Tour triangle .

After the Tour Montparnasse in 1973, Paris is set to construct its next skyscraper- Tour Triangle, designed by Herzog & De Meuron. The project has been the centre of much controversy. Designed in 2008, the tower was rejected by local authorities. It will see completion in 2018.

courtesy of © Herzog de Meuron

Tour Triangle is a 40 storey tall, 590 feet high tower, almost half of the Eiffel Tower. The tower was not accepted on grounds that certain government officials felt that it is unstable; several neighbours felt that it will overshadow their buildings. Adding to this was the fact that Tour Montparnasse was not widely accepted, and as a result in 1977 a regulation on the heights of buildings was imposed, limiting the heights of structures to 36 metres. Parisians felt that high rise structures will negatively impact the skyline of Paris and the historic ambience of the city. The restriction was lifted in 2010.

There is no denying that Tour Montparnasse seems out of context in the French Capital. However, the design of the Triangle Tower shows an entirely different picture altogether. Herzog & De Meuron have used the presence of the tower to reinstate the historic axis connecting Rue de Vaugirard and Avenue Ernest Renan and will also connect Porte de Versailles to the city.

The tower has been designed such that it will have no shadow. Even though this seems highly unlikely of such a massive structure, digital shadow studies of buildings suggest differently. The shadows of tall buildings move rapidly, rotating as the sun changes position, and not staying at one place for very long. In the case of small buildings, the shadow will only grow as the day advances and stay in one direction for long. Also, high-rise structures are stepped back inside after achieving a certain height, growing slimmer as they grow taller. The triangle tower seems to have combined the two principles. The architects claim that no part of the neighbouring area will be under the tower’s shadow for more than 40 minutes each day.

Wind and solar energy will power the building. It will be a mixed use tower with a 120 room hotel, a fine-dining restaurant, a bar and 70,000 square meters of office space. The architects have redesigned the scheme to include 2,240 square meters of co-working space, a day-care facility and other community facilities at the lower levels of the building. The tower is sleek and compact, and made of glass.

The total area is 92,200 square metre with a ground coverage of only 5259 square metre. The current density of Porte de Versailles is 0.85 and will rise to 1.10 once the tower is open. According to the architects the tower will only contribute to 3% of vehicular traffic in the area. Though 3% does not sound like much, it is still too optimistic to think that with an increase in density, there will be no change in the traffic scenario and the character of the city.

By: Sahiba Gulati

Tags: France Herzog Herzog & de Meuron herzog architect Paris Porte de Versailles Triangle 2

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Triangle Porte de Versailles, Paris

• Typologies Tower 
• City Paris 
• Country France 

Situated on the outskirts of Paris, at the Porte de Versailles and beside the Parc des Expositions, Triangle will be a visual reference on a metropolitan scale. Its singular shape – an irregular pyramid with a trapezoid base – contrasts with the unique profile of a classic tower in the form of a simple extrusion. The volumetry of Triangle allows for multiple and dynamic ways of perception, varying depending on the vantage points. As such, the building promises to become an ‘actor’ of the Parisian skyline, and will lend major visibility to the Porte de Versailles square and the Parc des Expositions convention center. On the scale of the Porte de Versailles site, the insertion of an emblematic building along the avenue Ernest Renan, in the very heart of the Parc des Expositions, and set back from the square and the neighboring buildings, will play a significant role in the reorganization of the flows and the perception of urban space. It will also restore the historical axis linking the 15th arrondissement of Paris with the surrounding districts of Issy-les- Moulineaux and Vanves.

The precise calibration of the volume of Triangle allows the building’s insertion into the city fabric, limiting its impact on the environment. Its triangular shape serves two purposes: it preserves generous views of the sky for the residents and, like a sundial, it reduces the casting of shadows onto the neighboring buildings. Triangle is conceived as a piece of the city that could be pivoted and positioned vertically. For the visitor, the project is first experienced from the square of the Porte de Versailles, where the public transportation networks converge. The base of the building is open to all, from the square of the Porte de Versailles and along the avenue Ernest Renan, which will regain the appearance of a Parisian street with shops and restaurants. The north-east vertical axis of Triangle, facing the center of Paris, holds two inclined elevators that link the atrium at street level to a panoramic restaurant in the higher levels of Triangle. From there, visitors will be able to go on to the highest levels of Triangle, up to a belvedere from which the entire metropolis can be discovered.

Triangle will thus become one of the major highlights of metropolitan Paris, recreating a strong and vibrant urban space at the Porte de Versailles. It will not only be a landmark from which the urban panorama can be experienced, but also an outstanding silhouette in the system of axes and monuments of the city, like a signal at the heart of the Parc des Expositions.   

Client SCI Tour Triangle (Unibail-Rodamco Group)

Herzog & de Meuron Project Team Partners : Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuron, Ascan Mergenthaler (Partner in Charge) Project Team: Raymond Jr. Gaëtan (Project Director, Associate), Stefan Goeddertz (Project Director, Associate). Michael Bär, Marta Colón de Carvajal Salís, Guillaume Delemazure (Associate), Sarah Firth, Piotr Fortuna, Claire Gamet, Pauline Gaulard,Erik Gerlach, Yann Gramegna, Stefan Hörner, Julien Combes, Shusuke Inoue, Kentaro Ishida (Associate), Anna Jach, Daekyung Jo, Srdjan Jovanovic, Daniel Kiss, Yuichi Kodai, Pawel Krzeminski, Andrea Landell, Jaroslav Mach, Clément Mathieu, Sara Jiménez Núñez, Leonardo Pérez-Alonso, Ella Ryhiner, Heeri Song, Basil Spiess, Masato Takahashi, Julie Wagner, Yves Wanger, Christian Zöllner.

Planning Architect Planning: Herzog & de Meuron; Partner Architect: Valode & Pistre; Mechanical Engineering: Egis; Structural Engineering: Setec TPI; Climate Engineering, Environmental Engineering: Egis Concept (Elioth); Economist: AE75; Elevator Consultant: Arup.

Consulting Acoustics: LAMOUREUX; Security: SOCOTEC Construction et Immobilier; Fire Security / Code: CSD-FACES/APEX.

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Tour Triangle

Note: As this project is under construction, the data is based on the most reliable information currently available. This data is thus subject to change until the building has completed and all information can be confirmed and ratified by the CTBUH.

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Official Name

Other names.

Projet Triangle

Under Construction

Expected Completion

Avenue Ernst Renan

Hotel / Office

Energy Label

HQE Exceptional targeted, BREEAM Excellent targeted

180 m / 591 ft

Floors Above Ground

# of hotel rooms.

91,000 m² / 979,516 ft²

Construction Schedule

Construction Start

Owner/Developer

Unibail-rodamco-westfield, material supplier material supplier refers to organizations which supplied significant systems/materials for a building project (e.g. elevator suppliers, facade suppliers, etc)., axa investment managers - real assets; unibail-rodamco-westfield.

Usually involved in the front end design, with a "typical" condition being that of a leadership role through either Schematic Design or Design Development, and then a monitoring role through the CD and CA phases.

Herzog & de Meuron Architekten

Other consultant other consultant refers to other organizations which provided significant consultation services for a building project (e.g. wind consultants, environmental consultants, fire and life safety consultants, etc)., centre scientifique et technique du bâtiment.

18 October 2016 | Paris

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Herzog de Meuron's Triangle Tower Design Raises Eyebrows in Paris

• Written by Kelly Minner
• Published on April 05, 2011

The 590ft (180m) proposed Herzog de Meuron design labeled ‘Triangle Tower’, has been in the spotlight over recent weeks after the cross-party council approved the tower’s protocol agreement. Opposing the recent approval, Green party members are eager to share their thoughts commenting that the “colossal” project is “yet another office block” according to party member Yves Contassot.

The controversy over the 40-story steel and glass building surely was anticipated; the French capital has had a 30+ year drought of buildings over 121ft. In 1977 a ban was put into place, shortly after the completion of the 689ft Tour Montparnasse, because Parisians feared that the city center would lose its existing urban fabric to skyscrapers similar to the Montparnasse.

To most Parisians the Montparnasse’s over exaggerated proportions and lack of character have left an uneasy feeling for future skyscraper development. Many citizens are not opposed to high-rise development, such as Olivier de Rohan Chabot member of Safeguard of French Art, however he has concerns, “Look at the Montparnasse Tower; it has crushed the hotel des Invalides (housing Napoleon’s tomb). The monument was built to be grandiose. But what has it become? A dwarf. The tower ridicules it. In this sense, it’s a veritable attack on the beauty of the capital” (as stated Le Figaro newspaper).

More following the break.

To put the project a bit more into context, the location for ‘Triangle Tower’ is near the Porte de Versailles which is home to an expansive exhibition centre. The Eiffel Tower at 1,072ft still will dominate the Paris skyline and has 482ft on the proposed Herzog de Meuron ’s ‘Triangle Tower’. Also to take into consideration are the buildings currently under construction in the business district of La Défense, west of the capital, some of Europe’s highest skyscrapers (Lighthouse, Signal and Hermitage Plaza towers).

Architects Herzog de Meuron were commissioned for the project which plans on utilizing both wind and solar power to generate energy. Its shape would “limit the shadow on neighbours” stated Jacques Herzog co-architect, continuing, “one mustn’t think of it as a tower. It’s more like a topography a vertical city.”

The Mayor of Paris , Bertrand Delanoë, is strongly backing the project which is in his opinion “emblematic of Paris’ aura and dynamism”. Anticipated to create 5,000 jobs according to local officials, the mixed-use ‘Triangle Tower’ will combine street level shopping with offices, a conference hall, and panoramic restaurant above.

If the ‘Triangle Tower’ is able to make it through all of the red-tape it will face it will require an estimated 535m euros and will have a tentative completion date of 2017.

Source: The Telegraph

• Sustainability

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Tour Triangle in Paris: the project is back… and approved!

In living in paris , what's on in paris.

The Tour Triangle project has been approved! This skyscraper will be a triangular-shaped tower and will be built in the Porte de Versailles area of Paris.

Tour Triangle project: first rejected, now approved!

The tour triangle : a new lease of life.

The Tour Triangle has been approved by the city of Paris because of its four major goals:   – Fostering economical development and creating employment (directly and indirectly) through its construction from 2017 to 2021 and eventually creating approximately 5000 new jobs . – Giving a new breath of fresh air to economic activity in the Porte de Versailles neighborhood and its surrounding neighborhoods. – Giving the Porte de Versailles neighborhood a tourist site on a national and international scale; – Encouraging architectural and urban innovation alongside Paris’ environmentally friendly guidelines   The Tour Triangle will be open to visitors and won’t only include offices but also a health center, a conference center, a view point, a panoramic restaurant and many other services and things to attract tourists!   To know more and to visit the Tour triangle, don’t hesitate to go on the project’s official website .  

And you? For or against the Tour Triangle?

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Project in focus: Hotel Tour Triangle, Paris

• by Lauren Jade Hill
• February 24, 2021
• All , Hotel Projects , Projects

by Lauren Jade Hill | 24 Feb 2021 | All , Hotel Projects , Projects

The pyramid-shaped Tour Triangle skyscraper, whose design team includes Herzog & de Meuron and Valode & Pistre Architectes, could change the skyline of the French capital.

This contentious newbuild, which is planned for completion ahead of the Olympics in 2024, is expected to incorporate a hotel between floors 12 and 17.

A new Parisian landmark

Rising 42 storeys and 180 metres high, Tour Triangle has been earmarked for a well-located Parc des Expositions site neighbouring Porte de Versailles Square. Upon completion, it’d be one of the tallest buildings within the city, not far behind the 209-metre Tour Montparnasse and 324-metre Eiffel Tower.

According to Herzog & de Meuron , the project aims to give greater visibility to the Porte de Versailles and Parc des Expositions site within the city as a whole, while also changing the flow and perception of urban space on a plot that currently divides the 15th district of Paris with the communities of Issy-les-Moulineaux and Vanves.

With this development, Herzog & de Meuron hopes to restore the historical axis formed by Rue de Vaugirard and Avenue Ernest Renan. The proposed structure would be set back from the surrounding residential areas, with its triangular shape reducing shadows cast on adjacent buildings.

Panoramic views of Paris

This landmark scheme would house coworking and open-plan office space, a health centre, daycare facilities, and a hotel comprising 120 guest rooms. Interestingly, the north-east side facing the centre of Paris would have a funicular linking the street-level public spaces to a restaurant and a belvedere offering panoramic views across the city.

Developer Unibail-Rodamco , in collaboration with investor Viparis Holding , is now set to begin construction. The design is being overseen by a team that includes Herzog & de Meuron and Valode & Pistre Architectes .

It’s not yet known which brand would operate the proposed hotel.

Many TOPHOTELNEWS articles draw on exclusive information from the TOPHOTELPROJECTS construction database. This subscription-based product includes details of thousands of hotel projects around the world, along with the key decision-makers behind them. Please note, our data may differ from records held by other organisations. Generally, the database focuses on four- and five-star schemes of significant scale; tracks projects in either the vision, pre-planning, planning, under-construction, pre-opening or newly opened phase; and covers newbuilds, extensions, refurbishments and conversions.

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Projet Triangle: Paris Pyramid Building

Projet Triangle, Paris Pyramid, Parisian Skyscraper Building, Herzog & de Meuron Design

Projet Triangle : Paris Pyramid Building

porte de Versailles skyscraper, France design by Herzog & de Meuron architects

Projet Triangle Paris Building

page updated 16 Nov 2016 with new images:

Projet Triangle Paris

Design: Herzog & de Meuron

Location: porte de Versailles

Height: 40 storeys

Projet Triangle

Herzog & de Meuron’s Paris pyramid has received approval by the city’s cross-party council which approved a protocol agreement for its construction in the south-west of the city.

The privately-financed building, which is still being opposed by heritage groups, has been downsized by ten storeys to 40 storeys since it was first unveiled in 2008. Plans for a museum, swimming pool and hotel have also been abandoned.

Practice founder Jacques Herzog told French daily Le Figaro that the building, expected to cost £470 million, would use wind and solar energy.

Projet Triangle will be the first skyscraper to be built in the French capital in 30 years, since socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoe introduced a ban on high-rises.

Work is scheduled to start on this Parisian pyramid building project next year and to complete in 2017.

Herzog & de Meuron argue the Projet Triangle design emphasizes the break between the Haussmanian 15th district (the old city) and the communities of Issy-le-Moulineaux and Vanves. It doesn’t say why that break needs a celebratory monument.

“The Triangle is conceived as a piece of the city that could be pivoted and positioned vertically. It is carve by a network of vertical and horizontal traffic flows of variable capacities and speeds. Like the boulevards, streets and more intimate passages of as city, these traffic flows carve the construction into islets of varying shapes and sizes”, Herzog & de Meuron write.

The Projet Triangle by Herzog & de Meuron is now set to be city’s first new high-rise. The Paris council unveiled plans for a 180m-tall 50-storey glass pyramid after voting to drop a ban on high-rise buildings in 2008.

The initial Paris pyramid building proposal was for offices, conference centre, 400-bed hotel, restaurants, cafes and gardens.

It is due to become the third tallest building in Paris after the Eiffel Tower and the Montparnasse Tower.

The project is the first of six high-rise schemes planned for the city following an official decision in Jul 2008 to break the ban on buildings higher than 37m.

Projet Triangle Paris – Building Information

– 92,500 sqm SHON – 88,400 sqm SHON for the office part – 2,600 sqm public areas (a big atrium on Porte de Versailles square, a panoramic restaurant ont the last floor) – 1,500 sqm of retailers on the ground floor – parking

Size of the Projet Triangle tower – height: 180 m – length on the ground floor (Ernest Renan avenue): 150 m – width on the ground floor: 35 m – width on the top: 16 m – total cost: around 500 M€

Next steps: 2012: launch of the building permit 2013: Launch of the yard 2016: opening

Projet Triangle Paris information from Herzog & de Meuron

Herzog & de Meuron Architects, Switzerland

Location: porte de Versailles, Paris , France, north western Europe

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‘Challengers’ Heats Up: How Zendaya’s Star Power and a Sexy Love Triangle Could Give Gen Z Its Next Movie Obsession

Photographs by Jason Hetherington

On June 20, 2022, Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor sat at the edge of a motel bed on either side of Zendaya , kissing, licking and biting her neck. As Art and Patrick, their respective “ Challengers ” characters, they were desperate for more of Tashi, played by Zendaya, and desperate to mask their desperation.

Zendaya’s mind was elsewhere. “The only reason I really remember is because Beyoncé came out with ‘Break My Soul’ that day,” she said. “I was having a great day, like, ‘Y’all. Beyoncé’s single just dropped.’ That’s what I was focused on, to be honest.”

Popular on Variety

The release of “Challengers” has been packed with so many contradictions, it’s no wonder no one knows what’s happening in the movie business anymore. This R-rated arthouse movie is being released wide domestically in theaters by a streamer (Amazon) that inherited the project in an $8.5 billion acquisition of a traditional studio (MGM).

Wait, there’s more: “Challengers,” directed by Luca Guadagnino , was supposed to be a fall awards movie — but saw its release date snuffed out by the actors strike. (If Zendaya can’t walk the carpet at the Venice Film Festival, which “Challengers” was meant to open, then what’s the point?) And somehow, “Challengers” has been showered with the global rollout usually reserved for Marvel movies, with splashy premieres in Sydney, London, Rome, Paris and L.A.

“Challengers” introduces Tashi Duncan as a teenage tennis prodigy who is lusted after by the showy Patrick Zweig and his shy best friend Art Donaldson, lesser players than Tashi but still talented. As she’s about to enroll at Stanford, Tashi hooks up with Patrick; she later marries Art. When Patrick reenters the couple’s lives 13 years later, Tashi must reckon with the choices she’s made. So must the guys.

“Challengers” presents the rarest, most satisfying species of love triangle: “Luca felt it was very important that, in any love triangle, all the corners touch,” says first-time screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes, “and I quickly realized he meant it literally.” Guadagnino encouraged Kuritzkes to write the steamy scene where Patrick and Art start out kissing Tashi but somehow end up in a makeout session of their own.

In the same way the release of “Challengers” has been so scattered, so have the interviews for this story. The three actors on our cover — Zendaya, O’Connor and Faist — assembled for a photo shoot in London in June 2023. Prior to the film’s original Venice release, it was the only time Faist was available while starring in “Brokeback Mountain” on the West End. We speak to Guadagnino more recently over Zoom in Rome, where he’s dressed like the world’s classiest film professor in a white cashmere cardigan. “It’s beautiful to kiss people!” he says about the most talked-about scene in his movie. “That’s what I want to say. People, kiss! Do not make war.”

There’s more to the kissing than pacifism. O’Connor, who gets on a Zoom with us from a nondescript Philadelphia location while doing press this month, says he doesn’t know how to label the sexuality of the boys of “Challengers,” which has been the subject of constant chatter online. “I think they’re everything,” he says. “I think it’s Platonic and non-Platonic. I think they’re obsessed with each other. I think it’s stronger than love — we need each other in order to feel complete.”

Tennis is notably absent from the pantheon of sports movies. That’s not for lack of trying: Kirsten Dunst took a swing with 2004’s “Wimbledon,” which made a modest profit before being forgotten, while in 2017, Shia LaBeouf’s “Borg vs McEnroe” failed to break even at the box office. Ditto “Battle of the Sexes,” starring Emma Stone as Billie Jean King. Even “King Richard,” which earned Will Smith an Oscar in 2022, only managed to gross $15 million because of its simultaneous streaming release during COVID.

But “Challengers” has what its predecessors lack: the more-than-sports appeal that’s kept films like “Rocky” and “Love & Basketball” on replay for decades.

It’s a good line, one she likely would have used to campaign for her first Oscar nomination last year. But then all hell broke loose.

The week after our interview, Amazon MGM Studios pulled “Challengers” from its coveted competition spot at Venice. “Of course we were bummed,” says Faist, 32, from London in early April. “But I’m glad the movie has been getting its time in the sun.” A breakout star after playing Riff in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 “West Side Story” remake, he’s still endearingly new to the press game. “It’s been a joy to see people respond to the film,” he adds before sheepishly clarifying that he has yet to see it with an audience.

O’Connor, 33, says that he’d invited family members to see the film in Venice. “There was a little bit of feeling stunted, but I agreed with everything about the strike,” says the actor, who won an Emmy for playing Prince Charles in “The Crown.” “There was no other option. I mean, the only other option would have been” — he breaks into a laugh — “to release it without doing press. Which would have been fine.”

Not that its stars lack a talent for doing press: Zendaya’s tennis-themed outfits have broken the internet time and again. But the delay represents an awkward test. Spring isn’t usually when ambitious, potentially awards-contending movies come out. And “Challengers” is playing catch-up at a sensitive time for its lead actress. Shortly after playing Chani in “Dune: Part Two,” Zendaya is getting her first shot at leading-lady status. If “Challengers” succeeds, she will cement herself as one of the most powerful movie stars of her generation, rivaled only by her “Dune” co-star Timothée Chalamet. Much is riding on the power of her serve.

“I’ve been playing 16-year-olds since I was 16,” Zendaya said, having launched her career on Disney Channel before moving on to projects such as HBO’s “Euphoria” and the most recent “Spider-Man” franchise, both centering on high schoolers. “So it was nice to play a character that was not a child anymore. It was also interesting playing parts of my life that I haven’t experienced yet: I’ve not gotten married. I’ve not had a child. Those milestones, I don’t necessarily have a direct reference point for. That was different to feel. Ultimately, it felt like the right time for a character like this.”

This moment certainly represents a crossroads in Zendaya’s career. “Euphoria,” the juggernaut series that won her two Emmys for playing the drug-addicted teenager Rue Bennett, is in limbo as the network retools its third season; according to sources, Zendaya — who serves as an executive producer — asked for major script changes from writer-director Sam Levinson. She has tactfully sidestepped most conversations about the show during her “Challengers” press tour and declined a follow-up interview for this story.

But at the movie’s L.A. premiere this month, when asked by Variety whether a third season of “Euphoria” will ever get made, she tosses up her hands. “I don’t know,” she says. “I am not in charge. If it’s right for the characters and everything turns out the way it should, of course.” But Zendaya, who isn’t the final decisionmaker on the show, leaves “Euphoria” fans with little hope: “It’s beyond me,” she says.

“Challengers” landing at Amazon at all was a fluke that speaks to the roller-coaster ride of making films right now. In early 2022, Kevin Ulrich, then chairman of the board of MGM, was on his way to lunch in Manhattan’s SoHo when he got a call from a friend, Christina Bazdekis, the UTA agent. She wanted to know if he’d be willing to stop by and meet Guadagnino, who was at a photo studio in the neighborhood.

Ulrich had never met the director, but they hit it off right away. Guadagnino showed Ulrich a 10-minute reel of the independently financed “Bones and All,” a movie starring Chalamet as a cannibal, which was finished but didn’t have distribution, and told him he was in the midst of developing a sexy tennis story starring Zendaya.

Ulrich wanted in. He called Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy — then the heads of MGM and now running Warner Bros. — and over the next 24 hours, they negotiated a two-picture deal, picking up both movies while the FCC still had yet to approve Amazon’s $8.5 billion acquisition of the studio. When that sale closed, the streaming giant inherited the titles, and Zendaya landed a $10 million paycheck as “Challengers” star and producer. “Bones and All” opened in theaters in 2022, grossing an underwhelming $15 million.

But “Challengers” is a more mainstream movie — sex and tennis probably appeal to a wider audience than cannibalism. Three years ago, producer Amy Pascal “flipped” when she and her producing partner, Rachel O’Connor, read Kuritzkes’ script. “We loved that it felt like a modern love story about three authentic characters who want the things we all want,” Pascal says in an email.

Kuritzkes was inspired to write a tennis movie while watching the infamous 2018 U.S. Open match between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, in which Williams was penalized for receiving coaching from the sidelines, an accusation she denied.

It was Kuritzkes’ first time hearing of that rule, and it instantly struck him as a cinematic conceit. “You’re all alone on the court. There’s only one other person who cares as much about what happens to you in this match as you do, and you can’t talk to them. I started to think, ‘What if you really had to talk about something important that went beyond tennis? Something going on with you personally?”

In “Challengers,” sex, lies and betrayal happen both on and off the court. “Tennis, by its nature, is a very erotic sport,” Kuritzkes explains. “It’s about being at a distance from somebody. Trying not to touch them, trying to just miss them, trying to make them think the ball is gonna go one place, and then go another place. There’s a deep intimacy in that, and a lot of repression. The point is no contact. To me, that’s almost like a Victorian romance. It’s very sexy. And you usually play tennis against somebody of the same gender, so tennis, by its nature, then becomes almost homoerotic.”

And there was only one actress that Pascal had in mind for the woman in this love triangle, and she knew how to slip her the script. “I’d worked with Amy on numerous ‘Spider-Men,’” Zendaya said. “She’d seen me grow up.” The search for a director did not last long either, she said. “The person that stood out to all of us was Luca Guadagnino.”

Guadagnino suggested that O’Connor play the cocky Patrick, a departure for the actor, who has been seen in more than a handful of British period dramas. For the role of Art, Guadagnino considered both Faist and his “West Side Story” co-star David Alvarez. Faist, who was living with family in Ohio at the time, wasn’t sure he was interested.

“My agent called and said, ‘There’s a really good script. You should take a look.’ I never read anything,” he admits. “I’m always telling my agents to leave me alone, is the truth of the matter, but I could tell in her voice that she really meant it. So I read it, and she was right. They asked if I could come to London to do a test screen with Z. I thought, ‘Why not? If I don’t get the job, I got a trip out of it.’”

Faist thought he had bombed the audition, but Guadagnino loved his interpretation of the character. “Luca’s two concerns, really, were that I was blond and that I didn’t have a hair on my body,” Faist says.

Guadagnino reveals that Faist was initially put off by the idea of manscaping. “I said, ‘Why?’ The day after, he was shaved! Athletes of that level need to be aerodynamic.”

For most of his career-making movies, including on “Call Me by Your Name,” Guadagnino rehearses with his casts as if they’re preparing for a stage play. For “Challengers,” the three actors spent six weeks in Boston, each day consumed with two hours of weightlifting and two hours of tennis followed by deep dives into the script.

“Anytime I wasn’t at work, I was watching something,” Zendaya said about the prep process. “I’m seeing these little kids on Instagram — like, 10 — absolutely professional. Like, ‘Wow, I’m terrible!’ I was obviously very intimidated by the fact that I was stepping into something I really didn’t understand.”

O’Connor isn’t someone who’d normally find himself at an Equinox. “I find gyms incredibly tedious,” he confesses. “I get bored very quickly. I always catch myself in the mirror, and I’m like, ‘You look so pathetic. You look rubbish holding your weights. And out of your depth.’ So I just never really lasted.” But he’s so built in “Challengers,” he felt proud to wear a sleeveless shirt in the final tennis match in the film.

The competition and camaraderie motivated him to get in shape. “There’s a piece of equipment that measures how strong your abdominals are,” O’Connor says. “And Zendaya had the best abs of the three of us by a long way. I remember me and Mike laughing, but we were also furious and desperately trying to improve our strength.”

As his actors were getting jacked, Guadagnino was busy tempting them with homemade pasta. “I tried to corrupt them all with food. I succeeded a few times with Josh. Zendaya, she ate a little bit,” he says. With Faist, though, “I never succeeded.”

Patrick’s other essential look was one he shared with Tashi. Twice, he throws on a shirt he likely picked up off her dorm room floor that said in capital letters: “I TOLD YA.” Though Tashi wears it before him in an argument with Art, even she wasn’t the first: The tee is a near replica of one John F. Kennedy Jr. was photographed wearing in the ’90s, itself appearing to reference the “I TOLD YOU SO” buttons collectors have held on to since the 1961 inauguration of his late father.

Tashi is indeed cursed with Kennedy-esque bad luck. “Tashi probably would have went on to be the greatest female tennis player,” Zendaya said, musing on the injury that sidelines her character and forces her to transition into coaching her husband. “She had all the makings and the mental fortitude, which makes it even more devastating, because we’ll never know what the world would have been like with her.”

Overlapping with the crushing weight of young fame are Tashi’s experiences as a Black woman in the tennis world. There’s the racism and sexism she rubs up against while moving through the larger institutions of the sport, and there’s also the position she finds herself in as a shepherd of both Art and Patrick’s careers; besides the big kissing scene, the most talked-about moment in “Challengers” is when Tashi spits in Patrick’s face the words, “I’m taking such good care of my little white boys.”

“It’s very clear to her that she’s coming into a place of privilege and access that she clearly didn’t grow up with, so she enjoys fucking with them about it,” Zendaya said. “All of her background is riding on her shoulders. It’s clear that she’s had to fight her way in, and is dealing with it on the daily, what it means to be a Black girl in that space. Tennis means more to her than it does to them; it’s not just something she decided to do because ‘I had the luxury of getting tennis lessons as a kid.’ This is it for her. This is what’s going to take care of herself and her family and the future. There’s so much riding on it.”

Kuritzkes knew where his characters came from as soon as he started writing: “Tashi was always a Black woman. Patrick was always a very well-to-do Jewish guy, and Art was always a somewhat well-to-do WASP.” Along with the inspiration he took from watching that Williams-Osaka match, he says, “It just kind of felt ridiculous to create a love triangle set in the tennis world with three American players and not have one of them be a Black woman. Because that is the story of American women’s tennis, if you look at all of the big superstars from the past decade.”

When asked how it felt to play a Black woman in a highly interracial relationship, Zendaya stumbled. “It’s more exclusive to Tashi,” she said. “I don’t know if I necessarily personally connected. “But I do know,” she continued, finding her footing, “being the kind of woman that she is, it would be difficult to be reduced and never called anything else but his wife. She’s his coach, and she’s constantly reminding people of that.”

This reminded Zendaya of one of the lyrics of her idol. “In the words of Beyoncé, don’t get it twisted, right? That’s true of a lot of women in power. Especially Black women in power.”

Marc Malkin contributed to this story.

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China launches Chang'e 6 lunar probe, revving up space race with U.S.

WENCHANG SPACE LAUNCH SITE, China — China launched an uncrewed lunar spacecraft Friday in a first-of-its-kind mission to bring back samples from the far side of the moon, the latest step in a rapidly advancing Chinese space program that is spurring competition with the United States and others. 

The Chang’e 6 lifted off on time at 5:27 p.m. local time (5:27 a.m. ET) from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China’s southern island province of Hainan.

The launch of the lunar probe, which NBC News was one of a handful of news organizations to attend, and the national excitement around it had transformed the normally sleepy fishing village of Longlou into a major tourist attraction, with crowds spilling from tour buses and heading to beaches and rooftops with the best views of the spaceport. One rooftop owner said he had sold out 200 seats at 200 yuan (about $28) each.

Ahead of the launch there was a festival-like atmosphere on the beach, where vendors offered space paraphernalia and groups of children sold Chinese flags for 3 yuan (about 40 cents) each. Families sprawled on picnic blankets playing cards, while others strung up hammocks between palm trees so they could wait in the limited shade.

Yiuwah Ng, a 28-year-old real estate office worker from the southern Chinese city of Zhuhai, traveled six hours by car and another three hours by ferry to stake out the best spot along the shore, where he had been camping for three days with friends and his dog. 

“I want to witness this historic moment,” he said of the launch, his fourth. “It’s an important first step for China’s lunar exploration.”

Max Zhang, a self-described “rocket chaser” from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, has been photographing launches at Wenchang from the beach since 2011. 

“I’m addicted to the shock of seeing the launches, especially the sound of the rocket flame,” he said. “It shakes my heart.”

‘ A force to be reckoned with’

If successful, the Chang’e mission will be a crucial step in realizing the country’s goals of landing Chinese astronauts on the moon by 2030 and eventually building a base on the lunar surface.

The outcome of the mission will also have implications far beyond China’s borders. A slew of spacefaring nations — including Russia, India, Japan and the U.S. — also have their sights set on the moon, creating what some experts have likened to a new kind of space race.

“China is trying to prove that it’s a force to be reckoned with, and so it’s always that China is competing against everyone in space,” said Clayton Swope, deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

A successful Chang’e 6 mission would demonstrate how sophisticated China’s lunar exploration program has become in a relatively short time.

“Twenty-five years ago, they had very rudimentary space capabilities,” said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank based in Washington. “Going from that to where they are today — I think they’ve clearly exceeded Russia, and their space capabilities are really only second to the United States.”

China achieved its first moon landing in 2013 with the Chang’e 3 mission, which set a lander and rover on the lunar surface to study the moon’s terrain. Before that, only the U.S. and the former Soviet Union had successfully landed spacecraft on the moon.

In 2019, China notched another historic milestone with its Chang’e 4 flight, becoming the first country to land a probe on the far side of the moon , the part that permanently faces away from Earth.

The following year, in 2020, China returned to the moon’s near side, which always faces Earth, landing the Chang’e 5 spacecraft on a volcanic plain known as Oceanus Procellarum. The probe retrieved samples there and brought them back to Earth, representing a big technological leap forward. 

The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has invited scientists from the U.S., Europe and Asia to apply to borrow the lunar samples for their own research, holding a pitch meeting last week in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Researchers funded by NASA received rare approval from Congress to submit proposals, raising the possibility of high-level U.S.-China space cooperation that is otherwise prohibited by U.S. law.

This time, the Chang’e 6 spacecraft is aiming to land and retrieve samples from the South Pole-Aitken basin, an ancient and sprawling impact crater on the far side of the moon.

Conducting a sample return mission from the side of the moon that always faces away from Earth is challenging because mission controllers on the ground have no way of directly contacting a spacecraft in that region. Instead, signals need to be relayed through a satellite now orbiting the moon that China launched from the same site in Hainan last month.

While difficult, the effort could have enormous payoffs. Studies suggest that the moon’s near side was more volcanically active than the far side, which means all of the lunar samples obtained thus far may be telling only part of the story of the moon’s origin and evolution.

Collecting lunar samples from different geological eras and regions “is of great value and significant for all mankind to have a more comprehensive understanding of the moon and even the origin of the solar system,” Ge Ping, a mission leader from CNSA’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, told reporters in Hainan on Thursday.

Beyond its scientific objectives, the Chang’e 6 mission carries with it geopolitical considerations. The flight is a precursor to a pair of Chinese robotic missions to the moon’s south pole to scout locations to build a moon base. Last year, the Chinese and Russian space agencies agreed to jointly build a research station on the lunar surface.

NASA and its commercial partners also aim to establish a permanent presence at the lunar south pole, though the agency’s Artemis moon missions have faced numerous delays and budget overruns . The current timeline has American astronauts returning to the lunar surface in 2026 at the earliest.

With China and Russia forming a rival coalition, there is some pressure for the U.S. to keep its foot on the accelerator, Harrison said.

“It does matter who gets there first, and it matters how you get there and what kind of coalition you’re bringing with you,” he said.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has on multiple occasions warned that the U.S. runs the risk of falling behind China’s lunar ambitions. In an interview this week with Yahoo Finance , Nelson outlined what’s at stake in the new space race.

“I think it’s not beyond the pale that China would suddenly say, ‘We are here. You stay out,’” he said.

Asked Thursday about international competition in space, Ge said, “All countries in the world should explore, develop and use outer space peacefully.” 

“There is no need to worry too much,” he added. “Space programs are for all humans.”

As more countries around the world build up space capabilities, NASA has pushed for more global cooperation, establishing the Artemis Accords in 2020 to promote peaceful, responsible and sustainable practices. U.S. law prevents China from joining the 39 other nations that have signed the accords, which both China and Russia have criticized as a tool to promote U.S. dominance in space.

Many Western space policy experts have in turn raised concerns about China’s and Russia’s intentions. The full scope of China’s ambitions in space is not known, for instance, because its space agency does not operate with the same level of transparency as NASA. The country’s space program is also more closely tied to the military than in the U.S.

“We cannot ever say that China’s investment in civilian space technologies are only civilian and not to be used for military purposes,” said Namrata Goswami, a professor in the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University and co-author of the 2020 book “Scramble for the Skies: The Great Power Competition to Control the Resources of Outer Space.”

While it may feel as if China’s spaceflight objectives have accelerated in recent years, they are part of a decadeslong strategy, Goswami said.

“Many of the leaders of China’s space program announced these goals and timelines 20 years ago,” she said. “What is astounding to me is that they are achieving almost all their milestones on time, and for them, that has a strategic advantage in the global narrative of who’s doing it better.”

As much as the moon and its resources can provoke competition among nations, space exploration can also be unifying, Swope said.

“We are literally a speck in the universe, and when we go to the moon or explore space, we as humankind have that shared human trait where we want to understand the unknown and we want to discover,” he said. “That does transcend politics.”

Janis Mackey Frayer reported from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in China, and Denise Chow reported from New York.

Janis Mackey Frayer is a Beijing-based correspondent for NBC News.

Denise Chow is a reporter for NBC News Science focused on general science and climate change.