Les Halles
From Paris Hotels Reviews
Located right of the city is the sprawling underground shopping and leisure complex of Les Halles, but in the 1970’s and now widely acknowledged as an architectural disaster -- so much so, in fact, that plans are under way to give it a major facelift. Described by Zola as “the belly of Paris”, the original Les Halles was Paris’s main food market for over eight hundred years, until it was moved out to the suburbs in 1969. Victor Baltard’s elegant nineteenth-century iron pavilions were destroyed (two were saved – one is in Nogent-sur-Marne, the other in Yokohama, Japan), despite widespread glass-and-steel shopping mall, known as the Forum des Halles, and a huge metro station, the biggest in Europe. The working-class quarter, with its night bars and bistros for the market traders, was largely swept away, and though much of the area above ground was landscaped, providing some welcome green space, the gardens have developed an unsavoury reputation as the preferred hang-out of drug-leaders.
Very soon, however, the whole complex will undergo a major renovation, scheduled for 2008-12, which should transform it for the better. French architect David Mangin, who won the commission, plans to suspend a vast glass roof over the forum, allowing light to flood in while overground redesigning the gardens and creating a wide promenade on the model of Barcelona’s Ramblans. His plans was chosen as the most sensitive to local needs, though it’s hard not to feel an opportunity has been missed to go for something really exciting and ambitious. Jean Nouvel, architect in the Institut du Monde Arabe, for example, put in a proposal for an enormous hanging garden, complete with a hundred-metre open-air swimming pool.
The forum is spread over four levels. The bottom level is the metro/RER station, used by some half million commuters a day. The other levels accommodate numerous shops, housed in aquarium-like arcades around a sunken patio; they’re mostly devoted to high-street fashion, though there’s also a decent FNAC bookshop and the forum des Créateurs (level-1), an outlet for young fashion designers. Leisure activities comprise a swimming pool (see p.415) and a number of cinemas, including the Forum des Images, which has four screens and a film archive of some 6,500 films, all connected with Paris of any of which you can watch in your own private booth. The des Images comes out of a major revamp in autumn 2007, with more space and a new café.
