Les Espaces d’Abraxas

Les Espaces d’Abraxas, Noisy-le-Grand, Paris
Chabe01, CC-BY-SA-4.0

In a new town east of Paris Bofill built housing like classical palaces on a giant scale. The precast concrete façades have columns ten storeys high. The complex is so theatrical that it has become a film set.

In the 1960s and 1970s several new towns were built around Paris, among them Marne-la-Vallée. Ricardo Bofill and his office, the Taller de Arquitectura, were commissioned to build a housing estate in Noisy-le-Grand, and it was built in 1978–1982. Bofill wanted to give ordinary tenants a monumental architecture inspired by palaces and theatres, as a counter-image to anonymous suburban blocks.

The complex consists of three parts. The Palacio is a tall U-shaped building whose façades have giant columns, some of them glazed stairwells. The Théâtre is a semicircular building opposite, recalling an ancient theatre. Between them stands the Arc, a triumphal arch that also contains flats. All the façades are built of precast concrete elements with columns, capitals and cornices. Everything is enlarged, so that the classical elements take on an almost unreal scale.

The complex has been criticised for being overwhelming and for flats that do not live up to the promise of the façades. It has been used in films such as Brazil and The Hunger Games. Les Espaces d’Abraxas is regarded as one of the best-known housing projects of postmodernism and an example of the same thinking as Bofill’s Arch on Södermalm in Stockholm.