Initially announced for 2012, the tower proved very difficult to get through the planning process. First, the city’s building code had to be changed, since height restrictions enacted in 1977 forbade any structure in Paris from rising more than 37 meters, or 121 feet. (An exception was made, in the early 90s, for Dominique Perrault’s National Library, whose towers rise 80 meters, or 262 feet.) In 2010, the city council voted to loosen the limit for certain peripheral areas, a bid on Delanoë’s part to modernize the city’s image and attract international investment in the context of increased global competition at the time of the Great Recession. But it says something about the ambient hostility to very tall buildings that, since then, just three have been completed: in addition to Triangle, Renzo Piano’s courthouse (2017), which rises 525 feet, and Jean Nouvel’s Duo Towers (2022), the taller of which is the same height as Triangle.

Besides residents’ associations, who fought Triangle in the courts, its most ferocious opponents were the Ecologist Party members of Delanoë’s own coalition, who denounced the project as an aberration in an era of global warming. Under Delanoë’s successor, Anne Hidalgo (who inherited his coalition), they sided with the opposition in the 2014 city-council vote that initially saw the tower’s permit refused. Thanks to a technicality, Hidalgo was able to organize a new vote in 2015, and this time the tower passed. But the lawsuits dragged on, delaying the start of construction until late 2021. The most recent legal action—launched that same year and still not concluded—accuses the city of favoritism when attributing the contract to Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield.

For its detractors, Triangle is a project from a bygone age that leaves a stain on Hidalgo’s legacy; for its champions, it symbolizes the city’s dynamism and supplies the first-rate, state-of-the-art offices that Paris currently lacks. Whatever its merits and drawbacks, it will be the city’s last skyscraper, at any rate for the foreseeable future: in 2023, the city council—which counted a higher number of Ecologist Party members following the 2020 municipal elections—voted to bring the maximum building height back down to 37 meters. That restriction does not apply to the business district of La Défense, however, where skyscraper construction continues.