The Great Arch: The origin story of Paris’s overlooked architectural monument

When you think of Paris, you think of the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Louvre, Sacre-Coeur, and Notre Dame. Maybe Sainte-Chapelle.

It’s a city full of famous monuments and for a century, people from all over the world have flocked to stand in the presence of these markers – markers of progress, science, art and culture, markers of a great city.

Former French president Francois Mitterrand understood the value of buildings and what they represented and set about his with Grands Projets, a series of ambitious civic works that included the Louvre Pyramid by I.M. Pei and the Bibliotheque nationale de France.

It also included the Grande Arche, an enormous white, marble-tiled cube which towers over its landscape, and through which there is a direct line to the Arc de Triomphe.

Despite its impressive architectural value, the Grande Arche is not on the list of Paris must-sees, likely because it sits outside the city’s 20 arrondisements centre at La Defense, a business area that has nothing else for tourists.

“Even in France, people do not know this building, the cube is not so famous,” Stephane Demoustier told The Nightly. “It is not connected to people in France.”

Demoustier is a filmmaker and his latest work, The Great Arch (French title: L’Inconnu de la Grande Arche), is a movie which tells the unusual story of the monument’s origins, and the man who dreamt it up.

In 1982, Mitterrand launched an international competition soliciting design ideas for a new building that would sit on the same geographical axis as the Arc de Triomphe and the Louvre, so that all three monuments would sit on a line.

The man who won was Johan Otto von Spreckelsen, a 50-something Danish architect teacher who had no political or social connections and only his own house and a handful of churches to his name.

“He won the competition due to the drawing he did and nothing else,” Demoustier explained.

“It was a shock for him coming from Denmark, coming from doing very small constructions and teaching, to be in the frenetic life of Paris and La Defense. It was a big contrast for him, and that was why he had such a difficult experience.

“He’s someone very sincere, and I admire that. There is a purity in his relationship to his art.”

But Spreckelsen was someone uncompromising, and when the reality of building the cube demanded alterations, the architect couldn’t reconcile that to his vision.

To Demoustier, architecture and filmmaking are both group endeavours. Actually making the thing, whether buildings or movies, requires the cooperation of other people, and a flexibility that Spreckelsen just didn’t have.

“It’s collective work and it’s work that you do inside a very complicated reality. When you do such work, you have to find a solution, and to be adaptable. It doesn’t mean you change the idea, you have to be faithful to your first idea, but you have to adapt.

“Spreckelsen didn’t manage it, that was his failure. He was sincere and that’s why we like him. He really suffered, that’s why we don’t want to condemn him.”

There was an accidental parallel between Spreckelsen’s inflexibility and the actor who played him, Claes Bang.

It’s not Bang too is a “my way or the highway” kind of guy. It’s that the Danish actor (The Square, Bad Sisters) didn’t speak a word of French and more than half his dialogue would be in France’s mother tongue.

“(Bang) focused on learning French as an obsession, I think it was a way for him to become Spreckelsen,” Demoustier recalled. “He was as obsessed by French as Spreckelsen was by his cube. He was always thinking about it.”

Bang set about memorising his lines in French, and while there had been some to-ing and fro-ing and line changes during rehearsals, by the time they went to shoot, the script had to be locked in.

“The fact that Bang could not change his lines was good for the way he was playing the character, because it’s also the story of someone who found it difficult to be free.”

Demoustier also liked that Bang is tall, standing just shy of two metres, because it visually emphasised Spreckelsen as someone who couldn’t connect with people around him.

Just like to 110-metre tall cube Spreckelsen wanted to build, Bang towered over his co-stars, which included Swann Arlaud and Xavier Dolan. “He’s a monumental guy,” Demoustier added.

When Mitterrand embarked on his Grands Projets, he wasn’t with his critics. He was accused of empire building, and, obviously, there is something inherently political about civic architecture.

It’s supposed to be a projection of strength and prosperity, and the forms chosen, the purpose of the work itself, represents a leader’s ambition either for themselves or for the nation.

“From the beginning of the 1980s, we had a French president who wanted to change life, we had a French president who had a vision, we had a French president who believed in creation, who believed in culture, who believed in Europe,” Demoustier contended.

“All these things have disappeared today.”

Mitterrand might have wanted his Grands Projets to be part of his personal legacy as well as that of France’s, but for Demoustier, there is no doubt that what the former French president was doing isn’t remotely on the same level as another grand arch being built in a different capital city today.

“(Mitterrand) did the (Grande Arche) with a lot of radicality because the building is something very bold. It’s very different from what Trump wants to do.

“You can’t compare these two ways of considering what is in the public interest.”

The Great Arch is in cinemas on October 1