A collapse in a few seconds. Sunday morning in Loos, a city of the Lille metropolis in the North, the Kennedy tower, 95 meters high and counting 28 floors was destroyed by lightning. In a few seconds, at 11:30 am, the highest housing tower north of Paris disappeared.
This HLM building, imagined by the brutalist architect Lillois Jean-Pierre Secq, will give way to a new organization in the Oliveaux district, housing between 7,000 and 8,000 inhabitants, suffering from impoverishment and enclavement. The overall cost of the urban renovation project amounts to 170 million euros, including 8.9 million nothing for the demolition of the tower.
“Mal aged”
The HLM building, completed in 1969, had been rehabilitated in 1995, but no longer corresponded to the current standards, with elevators stopping at half stands, and had very heavy operating expenses. “The Kennedy tower has aged badly. It was a set of housing […] Bringing all the comforts that could be expected at the dawn of the Thirty Glorious Years ”but with, in particular, poor sound and thermal insulation, sums up the mayor of Loos, Anne Voituir. And to underline: “When we started the resistance of the inhabitants in 2020, 70 dwellings were vacant” out of 220, synonymous with Désamour, “she said.
“It is the symbol of a bygone era that disappears,” summed up Éric Cojon, Director General of Partenord Habitat, the social landlord, upstream of the demolition.
800 kg of explosives
The 1,700 inhabitants around the tower were evacuated from 7:30 am to establish a security perimeter. They were then able to return to their home in the early afternoon. Eight hundred kilograms of explosives were necessary for the destruction of the building, reports France 3 Hauts-de-France. The lightning technique used allows to focus nuisance on a single day and bring the 19,000 tonnes of rubble to level -2.
