What a drag for the architect. After a string of successes spanning the globe, his legacy will be this.

I don't know what else he's designed, but -

Two investigations, administrative and judicial, were getting underway, and experts from some of the 400 companies that took part in the terminal's construction went to the scene.

I'm guessing that this one not only is unique in lasting less than a year, but in having required such staggering collaboration. I understand that any major project is going to require numerous companies specializing in one thing or another... but 400? Maybe I'm wrong, but that sounds like an awful lot of chefs in the kitchen.

"We are very touched by the cruelty of this collapse," Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin said as he examined the site.

Touched... by the cruelty... of the collapse..? Erm?

Oops. I'm the poster child for Preview Button Awareness Week.

Actually, Paul Andreu has designed plenty of... airports or airport terminals around the world.

Too many cooks in the kitchen by at least 350. No particluar person to have the finger pointed at, so it must be something else.

Let me be the first. Socialism doesn't work.

(Well that doesn't sound so original after all;-|

As an explication for the collapse, I heard yesterday on TV that it may be because a plane came too close to the terminal.

I am not kidding.

Ah, no one considered the possibility that planes might come close to terminals. Got it. Thanks for the link to Andreu's site - I can see that "boring" isn't in his vocabulary, though his webmaster is well aquainted with it.

The building itself, according to the talking heads in the show I watched yesterday, said the structure itself was completed in 2001.