Tour Alta: the new landmark making waves in Perret’s post-war Le Havre

Tour Alta, a 17-storey residential tower block unveiled in Le Havre in December 2023 was recently the centre of an architectural storm. Its twisting concrete design marked a departure from French architect Auguste Perret’s acclaimed post-war redevelopment of the town, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005.

While this listing is not at risk, UNESCO experts warned the building could be the start of a slippery slope. It is too tall, too austere in colour and breaks with Le Havre’s skyline, a document released in 2023 argued.

The controversy may have lost momentum since then, but it highlighted a longstanding debate in Le Havre.

Some argue that it should always remain Perret’s town. For others, there should be more opportunity to experiment.

Just look at Oscar Niemeyer, another architect and figure of local pride, who built Le Volcan, a nuclear-reactor-shaped cultural centre in 1982, and brought new dynamism to the town.

Heroic design

“We were commissioned to construct something atypical, heroic. It needed to be a dialogue between what was there; the two totemic figures of Perret and Niemeyer, and the future,” Jean-Christophe Masson told The Connexion.

Mr Masson and Gaëlle Hamonic are cofounders of Hamonic+Masson & Associés, the architectural practice behind Tour Alta. After winning the call for bids, they subsequently spent nine years working on and building it.

“We did not want to make a pastiche of Perret and Niemeyer, the postcard view of Le Havre. So we distorted Perret’s style by bringing elements of Niemeyer’s. This is what the tower is,” Mr Masson said.

“I like the Tour Alta but it doesn’t really rise to the challenge,” said Joseph Abram, one of the key decision-makers behind Le Havre’s UNESCO listing and author of an encyclopedia on Gustave Perret’s life and work.

Rather, he envisioned a building which would have absorbed more modernism but with even greater social elements from Perret’s work.

He told The Connexion that he would have preferred a belvedere, with the top three floors open to the public, much like the Appartement-Témoin Perret in Le Havre, a show apartment restored to its original 1950s appearance and open for guided visits.

Bombsite to rebuilding

Rewind to September 13, 1944, and Le Havre was a wasteland.

Three days before, Britain’s Royal Air Force and Navy had initiated Operation Astonia, a bombardment to force Nazi troops into a retreat. Some 10,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the town, killing 5,000 people, destroying 10,000 homes and leaving 80,000 people with no shelter.

When the armistice was signed, Auguste Perret was called in to rebuild the town centre. His idea was to stick to the initial plans of Francis I of France, who built the town in 1517.

It should regain its commercial force, Perret thought, through three major axes of circulation, forming a triangle: the Boulevard François I, the Rue de Paris and Avenue Foch.

Between 1945 and 1964, 100 architects assembled to build a coherent new town around these axes.

Some 1,200 housing units were built on the south-west boardwalk, businesses reopened along the Rue de Paris, the area around the Hôtel de Ville was opened out. The Avenue Foch served as the unofficial ‘Champs-Elysées of Le Havre’, according to Mr Perret’s vision.

Modular grid

“It is an outstanding post-war example of urban planning and architecture based on the unity of methodology and the use of prefabrication, the systematic utilisation of a modular grid, and the innovative exploitation of the potential of concrete,” UNESCO wrote in its landmark 2005 decision.

Concrete was the material of choice and grey set the tone, giving Le Havre the look of a Soviet city that residents nicknamed Stalingrad-sur-Mer. Film producers even used the town as a location for movies based in the Soviet Union up until the late 1980s.

Eglise Saint-Joseph is one of two emblematic buildings of that period, with its lantern tower reaching 107 metres and appearing as a sort of lighthouse for the town.

The other is the Hôtel de Ville, which officially opened in July 1958 boasting its own 18-storey tower at the west end.

“These are the two high points of Le Havre, representing both the religious and the political institutions. We wanted the third highest point to represent housing, a particularly relevant issue of our times,” said Mr Masson. “Symbolically, it is a beautiful triptych.”

For his part, Mr Abram thinks Tour Alta is “a Pandora’s box”.

He explained: “Not because more towers will be built, but because it will trigger a conservative backlash from UNESCO hardliners who would always favour turning Le Havre into a museum.

“I do not think it will go as far as to unlist Le Havre, but Tour Alta will be a landmark building to articulate that stance.”

Parts of Le Havre had already moved on from tired debates around beauty and ugliness. Compared to when he visited Le Havre for his thesis in 1980, Mr Abram said the Stalingrad-sur-Mer atmosphere has faded entirely. 

The district of Porte Océane was nicknamed Manhattan-sur-Mer by newspapers, borrowing from French writer and local Christophe Ono-dit-Biot who saw in Eglise Saint-Joseph’s lantern tower a “a Normandy version of New York”.

Mr Masson has pinned a photo of Le Havre’s new skyline in his office. It shows, from right to left, the lantern tower, Oscar Niemeyer’s cultural centre, the Tour Alta and the top of the Hôtel de Ville. 

“To the scale of Le Havre, Tour Alta has the same impact as the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It is one more element on its postcard,” he said.