Grande Arche

La Grande Arche de la Défense (pronounced: [la ɡʁɑ̃d aʁʃ də la defɑ̃s]; also La Grande Arche de la Fraternité) is a monument and building in the business district of La Défense and in the commune of Puteaux, to the west of Paris, France. It is usually known as the Arche de la Défense or simply as La Grande Arche.

Design and construction

A great national design competition was launched in 1982 as the initiative of French president François Mitterrand. Danish architect Johann Otto von Spreckelsen (1929–1987) and Danish engineer Erik Reitzel designed the winning entry to be a late-20th-century version of the Arc de Triomphe: a monument to humanity and humanitarian ideals rather than military victories. The construction of the monument began in 1985. Spreckelsen resigned on July 1986 and ratified the transfer of all his architectural responsibilities to his associate, French architect Paul Andreu. Reitzel continued his work until the monument was completed in 1989.

The Arche is in the approximate shape of a cube (width: 110m, height: 110m, depth: 110m); it has been suggested that the structure looks like a hypercube (a tesseract) projected onto the three-dimensional world. It has a prestressed concrete frame covered with glass and Carrara marble from Italy and was built by the French civil engineering company Bouygues.

La Défense

La Défense (French: [la de.fɑ̃s]) is a major business district of the Paris Metropolitan Area and of the Île-de-France region, located in the commune of Courbevoie, and parts of Puteaux and Nanterre, just west of the city of Paris.

La Défense is Europe's largest purpose-built business district with 560 hectares (5.6 million square metres) area, 72 glass and steel buildings of which 18 are completed skyscrapers, 180,000 daily workers, and 3.5 million square metres (37.7 million sq ft) of office space. Around its Grande Arche and esplanade ("le Parvis"), La Défense contains many of the Paris urban area's tallest high-rises.

The district is located at the westernmost extremity of the ten-kilometre-long Historical Axis of Paris, which starts at the Louvre in Central Paris, and continues along the Champs-Élysées, well beyond the Arc de Triomphe along the Avenue de la Grande Armée before culminating at La Défense. The district is centred in an orbital motorway straddling the Hauts-de-Seine département municipalities of Courbevoie, Nanterre and Puteaux. La Défense is primarily a business district, and hosts a population of 25,000 permanent residents and 45,000 students. La Défense is also visited by 8,000,000 tourists each year, and houses an open-air museum.

La Grande, Oregon

La Grande /ləˈɡrænd/ is a city in Union County, Oregon, United States. Originally named "Brownsville," it was forced to change its name because that name was already being used for a city in Linn County. Its current name comes from an early French settler, Charles Dause, who often used the phrase "La Grande" to describe the area's beauty. The population was 13,082 at the 2010 census. It is the county seat of Union County. La Grande lies east of the Blue Mountains and southeast of Pendleton.

History

Early settlement

The Grande Ronde Valley had long been a waypoint along the Oregon Trail. The first permanent settler in the La Grande area was Benjamin Brown in 1861. Not long after, the Leasey family and about twenty others settled there. The settlement was originally named after Ben Brown as Brown's Fort, Brown's Town, or Brownsville. There was already a Brownsville in Linn County, so when the post office was established in 1863, a more distinctive name was needed. It was decided to use "La Grande", a phrase used by a Frenchman, Charles Dause, to describe the area's scenic splendor. Before the post office was established, William Currey charged 50 cents a letter to carry the mail on horseback to and from the nearest post office, in Walla Walla, Washington. La Grande was incorporated as a city in 1865, and platted in 1868.

Paris

Paris (UK: /ˈpærɪs/ PARR-iss; US: ⁱ/ˈpɛərɪs/ PAIR-iss; French: [paʁi]) is the capital and most populous city of France. Situated on the Seine River, in the north of the country, it is in the centre of the Île-de-France region, also known as the région parisienne, "Paris Region". The City of Paris has an area of 105 km² (41 mi²) and a population of 2,241,346 (2014 estimate) within its administrative borders essentially unchanged since 1860.

Since the 19th century, the built-up area of Paris has grown far beyond its administrative borders; together with its suburbs, the whole agglomeration has a population of 10,550,350 (Jan. 2012 census).Paris' metropolitan area spans most of the Paris region and has a population of 12,341,418 (Jan. 2012 census), or one-fifth of the population of France. The administrative region covers 12,012 km² (4,638 mi²), with approximately 12 million inhabitants as of 2014, and has its own regional council and president.

Paris was founded in the 3rd century BC by a Celtic people called the Parisii, who gave the city its name. By the 12th century, Paris was the largest city in the western world, a prosperous trading centre, and the home of the University of Paris, one of the first in Europe. In the 18th century, it was the centre stage for the French Revolution, and became an important centre of finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts, a position it still retains today.

Arche

Arche (Ancient Greek: ἀρχή) is a Greek word with primary senses "beginning", "origin" or "source of action". (εξ’ ἀρχής: from the beginning, οr εξ’ ἀρχής λόγος: the original argument), and later first principle or element, first so used by Anaximander (Simplicius in Ph. 150.23), principles of knowledge (ἀρχαί) (Aristot. Metaph. 995b8). By extension, it may mean "first place, power", "method of government", "empire, realm", "authorities" (in plural: ἀρχαί), "command". The first principle or element corresponds to the "ultimate underlying substance" and "ultimate undemonstrable principle". In the philosophical language of the archaic period (8th-6th century BC), arche (or archai) designates the source, origin or root of things that exist. In ancient Greek philosophy, Aristotle foregrounded the meaning of arche as the element or principle of a thing, which although undemonstrable and intangible in itself, provides the conditions of the possibility of that thing.

Mythical cosmogonies

In the mythical Greek cosmogony of Hesiod (8th-7th century BC), the origin of the world is Chaos, considered as a divine primordial condition, from which everything else appeared. In the creation "chaos" is a gaping-void, but later the word is used to describe the space between the earth and the sky, after their separation. "Chaos" may mean infinite space, or a formless matter which can be differentiated. The notion of temporal infinity was familiar to the Greek mind from remote antiquity in the religious conception of immortality. The conception of the "divine" as an origin, influenced the first Greek philosophers.