In a City Wary of Skyscrapers, a New Tower May Rise PARIS - The last skyscraper built in Paris opened in 1973, an unadorned dark block, rising 59 stories - the Montparnasse Tower. It was considered a disaster. To this day, Parisians joke that the tower offers the best views in the city, because it is the only place from which you cannot see it. City officials went to work banning future skyscrapers altogether. Now, however, four decades later, Paris is again considering a new skyscraper - a triangular, 42-story glass office tower designed by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron that would stand in the city's southwest corner. Over the years, Parisians have come to embrace some of the city's bolder architectural adventures, such as the glass pyramids inside of the Louvre courtyard or the Pompidou Center, built with its network of colorfully painted water pipes and air-conditioning ducts on the outside. But the resistance to skyscrapers has been fierce. For some Parisians, the new proposal is another Montparnasse in the making, an architectural star turn that would further disfigure one of the city's key selling points - an almost perfect 19th-century skyline. For the last few decades, they say, the city has done very nicely by keeping office towers outside the city limits in areas like La Défense, on its western edge, now a forest of glass and steel. But in these trying times, with the country's economy moribund, the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has been arguing otherwise, delighted to see such a huge private investment in an area of Paris that, at the moment, is not much to look at. For now, the area is a collection of conference centers that lie between the highway that runs around the city periphery and a not particularly distinguished residential neighborhood in the 15th Arrondissement, near the Porte de Versailles. The tower would provide 5,000 construction jobs, city officials say. It would offer marquee office space that could attract new companies to establish headquarters here. Backed by Unibail-Rodamco, a top European property developer, the Triangle Tower would cost about 500 million euros, or about $627 million. "There are many selling points to this project," said Jean-Louis Missika, the city's deputy mayor for architecture and urbanism. It would be an important economic development for the city. Mr. Missika argues that a project like the new tower would act as a kind of lighthouse, giving distinction to the entire neighborhood, as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, prompted a rejuvenation of that city. Nonetheless, the project came close to dying this week as it failed to garner enough votes in the City Council. But as the vote came to an end, the winners made the mistake of brandishing their "no" ballots, making public what was supposed to be a private poll - and giving Ms. Hidalgo an opening to bring the whole matter to court. The vote was close, 78 to 83, pitting Ms. Hidalgo's Socialist city councilors against those from the center right and the environmentalist parties. A little more time and a new vote, city officials believe, and the tower might yet be built. Those against the project are furious at the mayor's maneuver. "It the vote had gone the other way, you can be sure that the mayor would have been just fine with it," said Olivier de Monicault, the president of SOS Paris, an association founded in the 1970s to oppose architectural projects, such as skyscrapers, that it believed would destroy Paris's distinct heritage. Mr. de Monicault said there were all kinds of arguments to be made against the tower, including that it was not a tower, but a wall that would cast a huge shadow on the surrounding neighborhood. But perhaps most fundamental, he said, is the fear of doing damage to the look and feel of the city: "Tourists do not come here to see Manhattan," he said. Leading the charge against the tower in the City Council was Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, from the center-right Union for a Popular Movement, who ran for mayor against Ms. Hidalgo this year and lost. Ms. Kosciusko-Morizet said the city's experience with solitary towers had proved them disastrous. "They overwhelm the neighborhood," she said. Moreover, she said, the tower would only help signal the edge of the city at a time when Paris is trying to reach across the highway that encircles it to better integrate the neighborhoods beyond. "We are not against modernity," Ms. Kosciusko-Morizet said, "but this is not about modernity. What we are hearing is the same arguments that got us the Montparnasse Tower. There is nothing unique here. All the cities in the world have glass towers. There is nothing inventive here. Ms. Kosciusko-Morizet said she found the use of a secret vote to be particularly dishonest since such votes were never used except over issues of personnel nominations. She said her party members had objected to the secret ballot all along and said before the vote that they would not keep their votes private. A poll conducted last year by the B.V.A. polling agency found that most Parisians - 62 percent - were against any new skyscrapers, even if for much-needed new housing. Often it seems it is the younger Parisians who are more inclined to see the new Triangle Tower in a positive light. "For me it makes economic sense," said Ralph Hippocrate, 28, a publicist for a French television channel. For jobs it might create, but also for the good it might do for the businesses in the neighborhood. But many older Parisians fear that city officials did not learn the lesson of Montparnasse, a building that regularly makes lists of the 10 ugliest buildings in the world. They believe that skyscrapers are simply out of place in the heart of Paris. "We are not in Dubai," said Danielle Outreman, 60, who is retired. I like it that in Paris I am not surrounded by enormous buildings. I think that putting them all in La Défense is just fine.