Qualla: Tour Paradis

Tour Paradis: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, CC BY-SA 3.0. From the platform of Liège-Guillemins railway station - itself a Calatrava-designed vault of glass and white steel - the eye is pulled across the esplanade to a single curving slab of concrete and photovoltaic glass that looks like an iron stood on end. This is Tour Paradis, 136 meters tall including its 18-meter spire, the tallest building in Belgium outside Brussels and the only skyscraper in Wallonia. Inside, on a typical mid-2020s weekday, more than a thousand desks for Belgian Federal Pensions Service employees sit largely empty - the tower opened in 2015, and within five years a pandemic had taught the civil service that home offices worked too. The locals, who had lodged 87 formal objections against the building before it was approved, now had a different argument: who exactly was paying the lease on all that vacant floor space.

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Image: A.Savin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tour Paradis: Why Liège builds up

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, CC BY-SA 3.0. Wallonia's other cities - Namur, Charleroi, Mons - spread sideways. They have room. Liège does not. The old industrial city sits in a tight bend of the Meuse, hemmed in by steep terrain and short on flat land, but with an urban area of more than 600,000 people, the third largest ...

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Image: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tour Paradis: The argument behind the curve

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean Housen, CC BY-SA 4.0. The federal Buildings Agency wanted to consolidate the Finance Department's Liege offices out of an asbestos-ridden building on the spot where Calatrava's esplanade was going. The first competition in 2007 was canceled on a procedural mistake - no European-level call for tenders ...

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Image: Jean Housen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tour Paradis: Engineering the half-oval

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean Housen, CC BY-SA 4.0. What got built between March 2012 and December 2014 looks, depending on the angle, like a half-oval, an iron, or a boat tipping back toward the sky. The structure is reinforced concrete, with prefabricated floors, beams, and columns made of C80/95 high-performance concrete - so s...

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Image: Jean Housen | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tour Paradis: An empire of empty desks

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jmh2o, CC BY-SA 4.0. On 12 December 2014, the Federal Buildings Agency took possession of a 52,946 square-meter tower on a 27.5-year lease. Floor 1 became classrooms; floors 2 through 17 and 20 through 25 became offices; 18 and 19 stayed undefined. Some 1,124 civil servants were to work there, genera...

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Image: Jmh2o | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tour Paradis: What the tower replaced

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY 4.0. Building the Guillemins district cost some heritage. In 2017 the Rigo House, listed as Walloon heritage, was demolished directly across from the Finance Tower because it sat in the way of the development plan and, increasingly, in the way of the future tram line. The decision dre...

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Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY 4.0