Architects vie to remake Les Halles

[Kris]

Architects vie to remake Paris's 1970s monstrosity

Jon Henley in Paris

Monday May 10, 2004

The Guardian

Arguably the biggest architectural error ever perpetrated on one the world's most beautiful cities, Le Forum des Halles, is to be revamped - and the plans are exciting as much controversy as its construction 30 years ago.

A sprawling concrete-and-glass monstrosity, the neon-lit underground shopping centre stands, outmoded and crumbling, on the site occupied for centuries by the central Paris food markets, France's equivalent of Covent Garden.

Its construction in the 1970s led to long-running protests as the area known as the belly of Paris became a building site for nearly a decade. It is now run down, vandalised and thoroughly unappealing, and the municipality wants to turn it into a spectacular attraction as popular with visitors as the Eiffel tower, the Pompidou Centre or the Louvre Pyramids.

"I'm aware that we are venturing into very sensitive territory," said the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, who must choose between four projects by the end of next month.

"I have no intention of imposing another trauma on this long-suffering neighbourhood. But this site is too symbolic of the centre of Paris for us to make another mistake of it."

Le Forum, which draws tens of millions of visitors a year, stands on a 15-hectare site bounded by the rues de Rivoli, Etienne Marcel and Louvre, and by the Boulevard Sebastopol. It currently houses an RER suburban railway station which handles 800,000 passengers a day, some 180 shops on four different levels, playgrounds, a swimming pool, cinemas and exhibition spaces.

But the decaying, graffiti-covered concrete walls of the cavernous mall, its strip lighting, sad stores, leaking roofs and unsavoury gardens - long a rendezvous for drug dealers - have become an embarrassment in a city that prides itself on combining architectural classicism and innovation.

Chic Parisians, wary of the mall's dodgy reputation as a daytime hangout for disaffected suburban youth, would rather shop elsewhere.

"The Forum is an ageing eyesore and it does not represent the vision of the centre of Paris that either the city council or most local residents would like to give," said a municipal spokesman. "We need to do something radical; something that everyone can be proud of."

Four projects have been submitted. The first, by the French architect David Mangin, envisages large, completely remodelled gardens and a wide promenade "like Barcelona's Ramblas", ending in a glass roof suspended nine metres above the forum.

It has won the support of most locals, who say they appreciate its green spaces, play areas for children, capacity to house food stores, and low height. "Of all of them, this is the only one that seems really to have taken into account the wishes of the local people," said Gilles Pourbaix, the head of one neighbourhood association.

The most spectacular project is that of Jean Nouvel; it is composed of vast green spaces at three different levels, including a hanging garden 27 metres (90ft) high, offering a breathtaking view over the city.

"Lots of people are drawn by that one," said Mr Pourbaix. "It's innovative all right, but we say simply that it would deprive the entire neighbourhood of all daylight."

The other plans, by the Dutch architects Winy Maas and Rem Koolhaas, propose respectively a huge glass roof covering some 40% of the Les Halles site; and 21 coloured glass pyramids dotted over the whole area, each offering access to a radically remodelled interior.

Mr Delanoe said he had no favourite, but added that "none of these projects is acceptable exactly as it stands".

Work is scheduled to start in 2007 and should be finished, demonstrations of local feeling permitting, in time for the Olympic Games that Paris hopes to host in 2012.


www.projetleshalles.com

[Kris]

June 13, 2004

Paris Prepares to Take Back Its Belly

By SARAH WHITING

Slide Show: Four Wildly Different Options for Les Halles

The Belly of Paris," Émile Zola's novel set in and around Les Halles in the late 1850's, vividly evokes the pungent smells, sights, sounds and tastes of the city's marketplace. Les Halles had long served Paris as its nutritional epicenter, in essence, its stomach. Zola wrote: "Then there came three Brie cheeses displayed on round platters and looking like melancholy extinct moons. Two of them, very dry, were at the full; the third, in its second quarter, was melting away in a white cream." Yet Les Halles was far more than a marketplace, and when the demands of expansion and congestion forced the relocation of the market in the late 1960's, the historian Louis Chevalier somberly proclaimed, "With Les Halles gone, Paris is gone."

Quashing a protracted debate over the site, Jacques Chirac, then the mayor, took charge, declaring that what was needed was not a monumental gesture but "accompaniment architecture." The outcome was the utterly banal Forum des Halles shopping mall and transit hub, completed in 1979. Although 800,000 commuters move through this space every day and another 100,000 people come to shop, swim, watch movies or just hang out, for a quarter century Paris has mostly ignored its former belly.

Les Halles now faces a new future. The current mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, invited four architectural firms to reconsider the entire 36-acre site. The schemes, two Dutch and two French, went on display at the Forum des Halles in April, and Mr. Delanoë, a Socialist, has said that this openness will insure that the selection process will be much more democratic than it was under the Gaullist Chirac. The exhibition, which will run through the summer, includes large transparent urns for public ballots; they've already been emptied once and are filling up again. Those unable to visit can express their opinions on an official Web site, www.projetleshalles.com , which has images, audio presentations by the architects, links to news coverage and even historical film of Les Halles. It will continue to provide an important public window onto the project through its construction.

While the French press has made much of this public process, the ballots are not votes but "expressions"; the choice remains in the hands of the mayor and his advisers. The winner is expected to be announced in early autumn.

Banking his political future on the project, Mr. Delanoë is determined that its first phase will be completed by 2007, when he will be up for re-election. Paris's urban past and present are marked by the extraordinary foresight of leaders willing to take risks on the city's future. If Mr. Delanoë succeeds in choosing for Les Halles a main course, rather than an accompaniment, there is no reason to believe that the city's future should be any less extraordinary.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

December 16, 2004

In Paris, a Cautious New Vision for Les Halles

By ALAN RIDING


The design by the architect David Mangin for Les Halles, the old market district of Paris, which the city hopes to rescue from blight.


A view of Les Halles today; a 1979 renovation did not have the intended effect.

PARIS, Dec. 15 - The "belly of Paris," as the old market district of Les Halles was long known, has had many looks in its eight centuries. Everyone agreed, however, that its last makeover in the 1970's was a disaster. Now, after months of deliberation, the mayor of Paris has chosen a French architect, David Mangin, to oversee a fresh attempt to rescue the 15-acre zone.

In doing so Wednesday, Mayor Bertrand Delanoë acted cautiously. Of four competing proposals, Mr. Mangin's design was the least radical, focusing on Les Halles' place in the landscape of central Paris more than on sculptural innovation. Further, instead of adopting Mr. Mangin's plan to renovate a huge underground mall and transportation hub known as the Forum des Halles, Mr. Delanoë called for a new design competition for the Forum.

"We have not chosen any of the models," Mr. Delanoë told a new conference in City Hall here. "We have chosen an urban concept for the heart of Paris."

Thus Mr. Mangin, 55, an architecture professor who heads the Seura firm, will act as coordinator of a project that will eventually involve other architects and may well change as it advances, much like the plans for the World Trade Center site in New York. Mr. Mangin's cost estimate of $130 million is also considered highly provisional, and the nearest date the mayor would offer for completion of work was "a long time before 2012," the year that Paris hopes to play host to the summer Olympics.

What seems likely to survive of Mr. Mangin's design is a broad avenue reminiscent of the Ramblas in Barcelona that will connect the 18th-century Commodities Exchange with the Forum des Halles through landscaped gardens. For the new Forum, though, Mr. Delanoë imagines a design of "elegance, luminosity, lightness and creativity" that will stand as "an artwork of the 21st century."

Still, given the district's troubled history, the mayor's general caution seemed wise to many. In the 1970's, after Les Halles' elegant 19th-century pavilions were torn down and the city's meat and vegetable markets moved to the suburbs, the "new" Halles was fraught with political and design squabbles, which resulted in a large hole for much of the decade. And when the project was completed in 1979, it looked ugly and dated to its critics.

As alarmingly, the district, which stands between the Louvre and the Georges Pompidou Center, was soon known as a gathering point for drug traffickers and petty criminals. "Les Halles has become a place that Parisians avoid," Mr. Mangin said in a recent interview posted on www.projetleshalles.com. "It should be a place people want to go to. It should become a major public space - like the Louvre or the Tuileries gardens."

Inspired as much by social as by aesthetic concerns, then, Mr. Delanoë's decision to act won wide support, and the 125,000 people who visited an exhibition of the four competing models here this summer reflected intense public interest.

Significantly, while two high-profile architects, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas, were also in the competition, public opinion here leaned toward Mr. Mangin's design, which was also backed by the Green Party, as well as by an association of local residents and Unibail, the company that owns the Forum shopping center, Europe's busiest. The fourth design, by Winy Maas of the Netherlands, was not considered a serious contender.

Now, in making the single most important decision since he took office in 2002, the mayor has spelled out his main preoccupation: "We want something that will not have to be torn down in 25 years."

Politics are a factor. Mr. Delanoë, a 54-year-old Socialist, enjoys considerable popularity and looks well placed to win re-election in 2007 - if he does not decide to make a bid for the French presidency that same year. And he is all too aware that mishandling of the latest "new" Halles would damage his political standing.

The perils are many. Les Halles-Châtelet station's five metro and three regional underground lines handle 800,000 passengers per day, while the Forum shopping center receives some 40 million visitors a year. With far more than the votes of the district's 7,000 residents at stake, then, major construction around the Forum seems unlikely to begin until after the spring 2007 elections.

Political sniping was not long in coming after the mayor's announcement. Jean-François Legaret, the conservative mayor of the city's first arrondissement, where Les Halles is located, spoke Wednesday of "an enormous fraud." Describing the competing models as "four unrealizable monsters," he noted: "Bertrand Delanoë announces, 'I choose Mangin,' then adds that he is abandoning his project and will organize a competition to find an architect to carry it out."

Further criticism seems likely when the Paris municipal council meets in February to debate the plan. However, Mr. Delanoë's coalition with the Greens has enough votes to insure it is approved.

In his news conference Wednesday, Mr. Delanoë said he was embracing audacity as well as realism, although the other designs were more daring: Mr. Nouvel planned three levels of gardens, including one "floating" 90 feet above the Forum (Mr. Mangin proposed a glass roof over the Forum, but only 30 feet above the ground); Mr. Koolhaas sought to link the zone's underground and gardens through multicolored glass towers resembling derricks; and Mr. Maas offered glass windows in the gardens to throw light into the underground mall and metro stations.

For Mr. Delanoë, though, Mr. Mangin's proposal alone linked Les Halles to the city. "The heart of Paris is once again reinserted into its body," he said. But he also stressed: "We are not at the end of the project. We have merely initiated a process. We want to be sure that, when we walk through the district in 25 years' time, we will contemplate its life and its beauty."

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[Kris]

January 6, 2005

ARCHITECTURE REVIEW | LES HALLES

A Rich Menu to Choose From for the 'Belly of Paris'

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF


A view of David Mangin's vision for Les Halles, in the heart of Paris.


Rem Koolhaas's proposal for Les Halles featured towers like Popsicles.

Until recently, no one could say that Paris was afraid of bold new buildings. The city was at the forefront of contemporary architecture for decades, from the 1977 Pompidou Center to the string of major monuments commissioned by François Mitterrand that rose in the 1980's and 90's.

The knock against such efforts is that they often produced second-rate work, like the cold, dysfunctional towers of the Bibliothèque Nationale or outright embarrassments like the hideous Bastille Opera.

But at least the competitions bolstered the city's image as a place where architecture matters. Obviously the powers-that-were understood the fact that no great city can remain creatively vital by wallowing in the past.

But the recent selection of David Mangin's plan for a major renovation of Les Halles, the fabled site of the city's former central market, shows how quickly such ambitions can evaporate.

The low-key design, selected over proposals by the Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas and the Rotterdam-based firm MVRDV - is a banally tasteful vision of Modernity that is apt to please those who are pathologically averse to risk.

But given the importance of the site, the choice of design is the kind of missed opportunity that the city could regret for decades - even if it is never built. In a particularly odd show of spinelessness, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, has decreed that Mr. Mangin's scheme will only be used as a master plan for the overall development, putting him in the same role as Daniel Libeskind at ground zero: a toothless architectural figurehead.

The utter lack of nerve behind the decision signals that Paris, for all its grace and beauty, has lost its trailblazing energy.

The site is already loaded with painful memories. The market of Les Halles, housed in Victor Baltard's stunning glass-and-steel pavilions, was one of the great monuments of 19th-century Paris.

Packed with humanity, it embodied the modern vision of the city as the great mixer of human experience, a place whose creative energy was derived from its pitch of social friction.

To Parisians, the demolition of the pavilions in the early 1970's was an architectural atrocity, comparable to the mid-1960's demolition of McKim, Mead & White's Beaux Arts-style Pennsylvania Station. The creation of the Forum des Halles on the same spot - a soulless warren of underground shops that has been a favorite haunt of drug dealers - exemplifies the worst of late-20th-century Modernity, with its tabula rasa approach to history and its penchant for sterile inhuman spaces.

Debates over the Forum's fate raise uncomfortable social issues. The underground Metro stations there - the busiest in Paris - serve more than 800,000 people a day. Its RER train line is the city's main connection to the working-class suburbs that ring the city.

Arab and African immigrants from those neighborhoods have made the underground mall one of the most profitable in the city. Keeping them trapped underground serves the interests of developers and soothes the fears of the gentrified classes that live nearby.

Mr. Mangin's design removes many of the eyesores while gingerly tiptoeing the social issues. The Forum's garish 1970's-era arched roofs would be obliterated.

Its gloomy interiors would be ripped out, replaced by a new underground atrium that would link the shop levels to the underground trains. Open and airy, the atrium helps bring clarity to what is now a terrifying maze of staircases and escalators and allows light to spill down to Metro and train platforms five stories underground.

The design's major architectural gesture is a low, glass-and-concrete roof structure that would cap off a renovated Forum mall. Conceived as a system of mechanized panels that would be used to control the flow of light and air into the building, the roof's streamlined silhouette sums up the spirit behind the design, a bland concoction that is impossible to hate or to love.

The relationship between the shopping mall and the gardens gives away why the project was so appealing to the city's political leaders. Entering the building, visitors will pass over a bridge that spans the mall's central atrium. From here, they can either descend to the underground shops or continue along a central pedestrian axis that divides the gardens in two, culminating at the massive dome of the 18th-century commodities exchange.

The design's rigid formal arrangement has its roots in Parisian history: Haussmann's grand 19th-century boulevards were often aligned to open up long axial views of the city's monuments. But the beauty of Haussmann's vision lies in the tensions he accidentally created between the bourgeois order of the boulevards and the congestion of the old medieval city - between rational and irrational worlds. Mr. Mangin's tepid, soft-focus approach is about erasing differences. Its aim is to keep a lid on the city's underbelly, lifting it up only enough to take a cautious peek inside.

Strikingly, all three of the losing designs sought to plug into the Forum's underground scene, and to varying degrees, link it more directly into the fabric of central Paris.

Mr. Nouvel's design, for example, carves up the existing forum, creating a series of platforms that wrap around a central atrium. But his forum rises nine stories into the air, a soaring tower that is a mirror image of the invisible world below. The various levels are reflected on an enormous mirrored ceiling, suggesting a world that extends endlessly into space. A mix of video images would be projected onto the ceiling.

This notion of the three-dimensional city extends to his design for the gardens. A series of paths cut diagonally through the main garden, breaking down its formal symmetry. The walkways follow the natural paths - "desire lines," a landscape architect would say - that people would take through the site to get to various existing streets. A "vertical garden" conceived as a series of stacked platforms, including one with a children's playground and another that would be used by chess players - would extend along one side of the garden near the St.-Eustache church. A natural landscape of ponds and fields would rest on the roof of the redesigned Forum, evoking a magic carpet hovering among the city's rooftops.

The result would have been a dramatic gateway to the city of Paris, breaking down the wall between the privileged residents of central Paris and the working-class people commuting from the suburbs.

But the most intriguing proposal of all was the design by Mr. Koolhaas. Rather than focus all of the activity within the site of the old Forum, he created a series of small candy-colored towers and scattered them around the park. They look like Popsicles, but in fact, they are more like small geysers, allowing the life below to spill out into the city. A tower housing a film archive and library, for example, would lead down to an underground cinema; another, housing a gym, would connect to an underground swimming pool. The gardens are also a wry play on the strict geometry of the classical French gardens at Versailles. Mr. Koolhaas envisions them as a pattern of circular spaces like enormous petri dishes, each with its own identity and function.

That approach extends to the Forum. In the current building, the shops that attract the most business are three levels underground, close to the train platforms. The upper-level shops are virtually empty. Mr. Koolhaas slices open an area above the upper-level shops extending down to create a canyon-like space would link the various levels and the train platforms.

His premise is cheeky: the old center of Paris is so beautiful that it has virtually become a museum. Why not inject it with new ideas?

Like Haussmann before him, he planned to attack central Paris with surgical precision. Yet rather than eliminate the social forces that Haussmann feared, Mr. Koolhaas wanted to let that energy seep out into the open and infect the city. The idea is to bind the two visions of Paris into a cohesive whole, in a genuinely contemporary view of how cities function.

That analytical approach no doubt intimidated city officials. The mayor, who made the final decision to have Mr. Mangin oversee a new design, had to placate both the mall's owner and local residents who feared what might be unleashed if the boundaries were completely removed.

The tragedy here is the low level of ambition.

At least Mitterrand failed on a grand scale.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

[ablarc]

[TLOZ Link5]

What's the large domed structure facing the Pompidou in the aerial rendering of Mangin's proposal?

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.paris.org/Monuments/Bourse.Commerce/


Politicians hate to take risks.

[Kris]

Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti have won the design contest for the roof.

Slide Show

(Patrick Berger did the Viaduc des Arts conversion and the greenhouses at the André-Citroën park.)

[ablarc]

Looks pretty terrible to me.

Rebuild Les Halles as it was and move the Clignancourt flea market to it (although it's pretty good where it is).

Or better still, restore the market's rectangular street grid (a rarity in Paris) and sell of smallish lots to developers to build boulevard buildings. Not sure that park is necessary.

[Kris]

Animation

[lofter1]

I don't get it -- either the need or the plan

[londonlawyer]

If this project was in NY, there would be lawsuits. People would be demanding that housing units for poor people be included, etc., and it would get watered down to something lame. NY can be such a joke.

[lofter1]

I think the project as proposed is a bit of a joke -- it's a large umbrella, no?

[Jasonik]

A colossal riff on Hector Guimard.

[lofter1]

No doubt they've got it figured out, but looking at it makes me wonder how they clean the top ...