The Power of the Tower: Nicolas Schöffer’s Tour Lumière Cybernétique for La Défense 1962–1973

This paper looks at Nicolas Schöffer’s unrealised Tour Lumière Cybernétique (1962–1973) to explore the interplay between urban data, participation, and political consensus in 1960s France. Envisioned for Paris’s business district La Défense, the purpose of the tower was to help keep the city in a technological equilibrium by employing a set of automated algorithms for collecting and visualising inputs received from the urban environment. Yet Schöffer’s ad-hoc disruptive interventions, the so-called perturbations that he deemed essential to the tower’s program, suggest that he regarded the outcome of data collection to be too monotonous to maintain that desired equilibrium.This article stands at the intersection of histories of architecture and urban data-processing. It aims to suggest that Schöffer’s TLC tower presents an indirect version of participation, one that, rather than fostering self-determinacy or proposing a political agenda, focuses on the extraction as well as abstraction of information ultimately framed as a participatory practice.