Alright, Archi-geeks... we've given you a few days to form your opinions about "Phare" (Lighthouse or Beacon), the new Morphosis building that will be gracing La Defense in 2012... and that's few days more than it takes for any good Archi-geek to briefly glance at the rendering and either proclaim it to be genius or to mutter a snarky comment that's laced with academic references...

As 2005 Pritzker Prize winner Thom Mayne places his mark on Paris with a building that will almost be as tall as that 324-metre leftover from the Exposition Universelle, we can hear the bloggers and news agencies typing away at their keyboards.

There's lots of reading to be done at CyberArchi [fr], Gridskipper, Dezeen, Treehugger, le Moniteur-expert.com [fr], L'Express [fr], Le Monde [fr], Mon Puteaux [fr], Batiactu [fr], TrendsNow.net [fr], and Archinect.

The most interesting thing that we've read so far comes from Charles Bremner at the TimesOnline.co.uk, who writes:

I apologise to those who take me to task for bringing Nicolas Sarkozy into so many posts, but here we go again. The Interior Minister and centre-right presidential candidate is boss of La Défense's development agency, known as EPAD. The new towers are part of their plans for a big expansion of office space. The Delanoe team and the Ile de France (Paris region) council -- headed by Socialists -- are annoyed because the Défense expansion runs counter to the campaign to rebalance Paris by developing the neglected eastern outskirts.

Their complaints are greeted with a shrug from Sarkozy and his friends. Companies with the cash for big monuments all want to stay in the west. Location, location, location, they say.

Parisist gets excited when any new building comes into our jurisdiction, and this will be the second big architectural announcement for Paris this year, (Gehry's Cloud being the other). But we too have some comments on the Mayne building... we admit that its "soft form" constrasts nicely with Arche de la Défense, but we mostly think that it looks more like a (really, really specific) Gehry building than that of LA-based Morphosis' usual jagged geometry of landscaped planes.

We also are a bit suspicious of most projects that are both "corporate" [fr] and "green," especially after we saw this comment by mhollenstein on Archinect:

hahaha, i love it when morphosis talk about green buildings. i went to a thom mayne talk in sydney last year and he was trying to tell us his building had a living skin because you could open the windows to get some natural ventilation. haha, you dont say stupid shit like that to australians, most people walked out.

But only time will tell as to what Parisians will say. We already know it's better looking than Montparnasse, but does anyone think that those wind turbines on top make the building look a bit like a muppet or something?

Previous Morphosis in Paris can be found at the Centre Pompidou [fr] and at Fsens.com here and here.