Editor’s Note:  In April, 1990, Jean Gwinn Riboud gave me a tour of the newly opened La Defense building complex in Paris.  My employer for many years, Encyclopaedia Britannica, describes La Defence this way:

Today tall office buildings, heated and air-conditioned from a central plant, are the hub of the complex. The “ground level” between buildings is a raised platform reserved for pedestrians, with roads and parking below. There are shops, restaurants, cafés, hotels, and apartment houses.

I noticed Britannica’s French encyclopedia, Encyclopaedia Universalis, had a pop-up sales stand with an umbrella in one of the shopping areas. The enormous plaza is quite extraordinary and filled with pedestrians, shoppers and skateboarders.