The new face of Les Halles, arguably the ugliest scar to disfigure the world’s most beautiful city, will finally be unveiled this week when the mayor of Paris announces which of four competing projects he has chosen to revamp the sprawling concrete and glass monstrosity.
Postponed for more than six months, the decision is one of the most sensitive that Bertrand Delanoe will face in his five-year mandate: few spots are at once as visible, as commercially important and as emblematic of the city as the 15ha site known for centuries as the Belly of Paris.
”He still hasn’t made his mind up,” one of Delanoe’s aides said on Sunday. ”Les Halles has suffered for decades, and it can’t afford another mistake. It’s really a very big thing. That’s why he’s hesitating.”
Paris’s equivalent of Covent Garden, Les Halles was the city’s bustling central food market until the 1960s, when — despite a long-running and occasionally violent protest campaign by local residents — the old halls were unceremoniously torn down and the whole area became a building site for a decade.
The site, used by upwards of 41-million people a year, now houses an irredeemably 70s mall with 180 shops on four different levels; a suburban railway and metro interchange that handles 800 000 passengers a day; a swimming pool; a library; a music school; and the largest cinema multiplex in Europe.
But in a city that prides itself on achieving a pleasing blend of inspired architectural innovation and well-preserved classicism, the decaying and graffiti-tagged walls of Les Halles, its leaking roofs and its largely unusable gardens — a well-known hangout for drug dealers — are now an embarrassment.
And despite spending of about â,¬10-million over the past decade on superficial improvements, the complex is by no means as profitable as it could be: a favourite daytime and early-evening haunt for the disaffected youth of the suburbs, its stores have drifted inexorably downmarket and the centre is avoided by most Parisians.
The socialist city council headed by Delanoe would like to see what one of its members has called an ”ageing eyesore that meets the requirements neither of the municipality nor of local residents” turned into a spectacular, modern and practical attraction likely to prove as big a draw for visitors as the Eiffel tower, the Pompidou Centre or the Pyramids of the Louvre.
Of the four projects retained from 32 entrants last April, two are rumoured to have caught the eyes of the mayor and of the council’s six-member tenders commit tee, which is nominally responsible for choosing the winner. The favourite, by the French architect David Mangin, is backed by most local residents, who appreciate its greenery, play areas for children and capacity to house neighbourhood food stores, and by some influential Greens on the city council, who say it is ”by some way the least bad” proposal.
Mangin’s plan envisages four hectares of remodelled gardens split by a wide and elegant promenade which would, the architect says, resemble Barcelona’s Ramblas. At the far end of the gardens, the revamped shopping centre would be covered by a vast glass roof suspended nine metres above the forum.
The runner-up, if the rumours are to be believed, is Rem Koolhaas. Architecturally more daring, the Dutch architect has proposed dotting 21 differently-coloured glass pyramids over the whole area, each offering access to a radically redesigned interior.
Admired by the stylists, Koolhaas’s plan is less appreciated by locals and, perhaps crucially, by the mall operator — because it would allow rail passengers to leave the station without going past the shops. – Guardian Unlimited Â