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It’s been a long time since I visited the Pompidou Centre,
and the day I did was a lovely almost-spring day. This is important because one of the best parts of the
Pompidou is the outdoor escalators that let you float majestically to the top
of the building. An inspiring view
of Paris slowly opens up as your rise towards the temporary exhibits, and
suddenly you find yourself thinking:
to heck with Dali, I just want to gaze out at the rooftops. It’s all there, Sacre Coeur, Notre
Dame, the Eiffel Tower—just about every Big Name in the guidebooks peeks out
above the grey roofs and limestone.
One thing you can’t see is the construction at Les
Halles. Which is pretty amazing
because it’s right nearby and gigantic. The hideous 70’s era upper structure of the Forum des Halles is being pulled down, soon to be replaced by a futuristic “canopy” the
size of a football field.
From the computer drawings it looks pretty cool – I just hope it’s not
really that color yellow or it’s going to look, well, weird. Weird seems to have been the watchword
for architectural undertakings at Les Halles since they tore down the old
central market with its graceful 19th century pavilions in 1971.
When I was a wistful teenager, my family
moved to Paris because my dad was on sabbatical. It was 1978, the Forum just opened, and I found it
terrifying. Shopping centers were
pretty new back then, but this one looked like it had been sucked into the
ground by a giant, cement-eating monster.
There was a gaping hole where the building should have been, and if you
looked down it was as if the building had been turned inside out. Incredibly, there were stores down
there, with people milling around in them. I stayed away, afraid of being pulled in by some fiendish
gravitational force.
While the RER station is still open, the rest of the
shopping center and gardens is masked by a high metal wall, with the occasional
grill that lets you see what’s going on inside. All hell has broken loose, it seems, and the entire shopping
center has disappeared—except for the hole, which continues to buzz with customers
despite the apocalyptic activity going on above. Like a wound that will never heal, it appears that the only
solution is to cover it up in a way that allows air to circulate so it won’t
fester. The cover, which is being
called La Canopée, is an immense, undulating sheet of glass and metal that
“floats” over the hole and a new esplanade, as well as an assortment of
light-filled public facilities such as a music conservatory, a library, and a
Hip-Hop center (don’t ask me, that’s what it says on the official site).
While I’m still unsure about the color, I have to admit that
the canopy looks like a vast improvement.
There’s something soothing about it’s wavy look, at least on paper. I still think it’s a shame that they
didn’t save a couple of those elegant 19th-century pavilions back in
the 70s, but this does seem like a nice way for the city to make amends for its
previous architectural crimes. And
maybe now that the hole will be safely covered, I’ll stop worrying about
falling in.
1 comment:
Bet I’m the only reader who remembers the original Halles when they were the wholesale market. Indeed the all-night restaurants were as fabulous as their mythology claims. Indeed the streets round about were chaotic from about 20:00 until 05:00, as trucks brought the produce in and camionettes took it back out.
I actually did casual labour at night there, for a couple of nights until they found out I was a foreigner and told me to get lost. Not to worry, I became a pavement artist and did ok…until it rained.
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