A 50-storey glass pyramid is to transform the Paris skyline after officials eager to rejuvenate the city voted to drop a ban on high-rise buildings.

The building will be the first of six innovative towers on the city's outskirts reaching as high as 200 metres (650ft) into the sky.

“Paris is on the move,” Anne Hidalgo, the Deputy Mayor, told The Times as she unveiled the plans yesterday.

Paris Council hopes that the decision to scrap laws limiting new buildings to a height of no more than 37m will allow the city to overtake rivals such as London, Berlin and Barcelona as Europe's most vibrant metropolis. “In the international competition we are facing we don't want height to be a taboo subject any more,” Ms Hidalgo said.

The first scheme will be Le Projet Triangle at Porte de Versailles in southern Paris, a privately funded, pyramid-shaped edifice created by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss architects who designed Tate Modern and the Olympic stadium in Beijing.

Described variously as a modern Cheops, a giant blade or a witch's hat, the tower is due to be completed in 2012 and will contain offices, a conference centre and a 400-bedroom hotel as well as restaurants and cafes. Around it will be parks, gardens, shops and a bridge touted as a symbolic link between Paris and its downtrodden and often violent suburbs.

The initial plan is for a 180m-high building, making it the third tallest in Paris, after the 325m Eiffel Tower and the 210m Montparnasse Tower. Mr Herzog, however, said that he wanted to add a few more floors to reach 211m “just so we can beat Montparnasse” - a construction deemed so ugly that it led to the ban on skyscrapers in 1977. “It will be like a vertical city. It will be a landmark for Paris.”

He said that the triangular form would avoid casting a shadow on neighbouring streets, so removing a frequently aired objection to high-rise projects in the city. The tower would be an ecological triumph, running on solar and wind power and needing little heating. “The real problem will be cooling it down,” said a spokesman.

However, the plans are certain to run into resistance among the 63 per cent of Parisians who remain steadfastly opposed to skyscrapers, according to an opinion poll. In their eyes, high-rise towers are synonymous with New York or Shanghai and would be a blot on a unique urban landscape shaped by Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, the Paris region prefect, in the 1860s.

Mr Herzog admitted that the challenge would be to fit his futuristic building into “the most perfect city in the world, urbanistically speaking”.

Opposition is likely to be fuelled by another council plan to authorise 50m-high residential towers in the centre of the city to provide social housing and a proposal - which is backed by President Sarkozy - to build three, 300m-high towers in the business district west of Paris.

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