Paris has just re-enacted a citywide ordinance banning buildings more than 37 metres, or twelve storeys in height. In the intervening, shamelessly Anglo-Saxon interregnum, Herzog and de Meuron managed to squeeze a rather odd pyramidal tower through planning. They must have a certain ambivalence about it since it’s very reticent from one perspective and quite unabashed from another.

Regardless, this chunk of Toblerone occasioned the reimposition of the height ban. Quite right too – isn’t the point of Paris, or metropolitan Paris at least, to be impossibly glamourous and palatial – grand and low?

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