3D print the Grande Arche
A free, printable model of the Grande Arche and the buildings, roads and open ground around it in La Défense, generated from real map data in your browser.
Free, in your browser. Exports a slicer-ready 3MF.
About the Grande Arche
La Grande Arche de la Défense stands in La Défense, the business district in the commune of Puteaux, west of Paris. Its first name was La Grande Arche de la Fraternité, and people usually shorten the name to the Arche de la Défense or La Grande Arche. The building is a cube 110 meters (360 ft) high. It lies on the perspective running from the Louvre to the Arc de Triomphe, which stands 4 km from it, and it was one of François Mitterrand's Grands Projets.
Mitterrand launched a national design competition in 1982. The winning entry came from the Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen and the Danish engineer Erik Reitzel, who conceived a late-20th-century counterpart to the Arc de Triomphe, honoring humanity and humanitarian ideals instead of military victories. Construction began in 1985, with the French civil engineering company Bouygues doing most of the work. In July 1986 Spreckelsen resigned, and Paul Andreu took over the architectural work; Reitzel stayed until completion in 1989.
The structure is a prestressed concrete frame clad in glass and granite, and Reitzel said it was meant to look like a tesseract, the four-dimensional counterpart of the cube, projected into three dimensions. It is turned 6.33° about the vertical axis, mainly for a technical reason: a station for the Paris Metro and RER, plus a motorway, sit directly beneath it, and that angle was the only way to fit its giant foundations. Its two sides house government offices, and the open center holds skeletal shafts for panoramic lifts, plus a sunshade of tensile membrane called the Cloud.
How it prints
Make this print opens the generator on a 600 m square around the landmark. Buildings print at close to true scale, so the landmark grows with the print size.
| Print size | Landmark height | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| 160 mm default | 31 mm | 1:3,750 |
| 200 mm | 38 mm | 1:3,000 |
| 256 mm | 49 mm | 1:2,344 |
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East
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South
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West
- Fine facade grid
- A fine grid of panels covers the cube's sides. Print friendly adapts this surface detail to the print scale; Full detail keeps it, which suits a larger print or a fine nozzle.
- Delicate shapes in the opening
- A thin, sheet-like canopy shape sits inside the open center. Printing slowly and using layers of 0.12 to 0.16 mm helps these delicate parts come out cleanly.
- One piece with the ground
- The Grande Arche is joined to the ground in the exported file, and the four-side check found no floating parts, so nothing needs gluing.
- Pick the detail for your nozzle
- In the Buildings settings, set Landmark detail to Print friendly to adapt thin parts and small details to the print scale. Full detail keeps every modeled feature, for larger prints or a finer nozzle.
- Colors
- Buildings, roads, water and ground arrive as separate filament slots in the 3MF. The Grande Arche takes the building color.
- File format
- You get a 3MF for Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer or PrusaSlicer. Any of them can save it as STL if you need one.
About this model
The Grande Arche is one of more than 2,300 landmark models in Mini Skyline. They are made with AI, and each one is checked from four sides in its real surroundings before release. Everything around it is built from OpenStreetMap and Overture map data. If you would rather print the shape from map data, turn off Landmark models in the Buildings settings.
Common questions
Is there a Grande Arche STL I can download?
Mini Skyline builds the file for you in your browser and exports 3MF, which every major slicer opens. If you need an STL, open the 3MF in your slicer and export it from there.
How big can I print it?
Any print size from 40 mm across. The Grande Arche grows with the print: about 31 mm tall on the default 160 mm print. For a model larger than your printer bed, Project Mode splits the area into tiles.
Is it free?
Yes. Generation runs in your browser, with no account and nothing behind a paywall.
