Foster and Partners has won planning for western Europe’s tallest mixed-use towers near La Défense on the edge of Paris.

The twin towers, both 320m high, will forever alter the city’s skyline.

The Hermitage Plaza scheme contains cafés, shops and a public plaza at ground level and a hotel, spa, apartments, offices and apartments in the towers.

The towers, whose diagrid structure uses less steel and is intended to emphasise their slender proportions, face each other across the plaza which buries a busy road.

As they rise from an interlocking diamond-shaped plan, they turn outward to address views across Paris.

Grant Brooker, a senior partner at Foster and Partners, said: “Our ambition was to create a project that would inject new life into La Défense by bringing a new type of occupation and creating a new public focus on the edge of the Seine.

“This announcement represents a very important stage in the project’s development,” he said.