Les Espaces d’Abraxas- on form and function in public housing

We are in Les Espaces d’Abraxas. Opened in 1982, the residential complex exemplifies Ricardo Bofill’s answer to the ‘second housing crisis’ France faced in the 1970s. Faced with an overwhelming influx of inhabitants after World War II, Paris had grown surrounded by the so-called grands ensembles, large housing structures in the periphery of the city built to satisfy the pressing housing shortage. Over the decades, living conditions in the newly built and densely populated towns had worsened significantly: poorly maintained, functionally standardised and far-off from the city’s infrastructure, the initial vision of new and self-sufficient towns surrounding the metropolis never materialised. Instead, life within the modernist housing complexes, conceived along Le Corbusier’s concept of the house as a machine à habiter, was characterised by isolation, dilapidation and dreary monotony. 

Bofill was tasked by the French government with building new complexes which would provide large amounts of housing that were to bear a solution to the issues the existing ones faced. Officials saw in his work a way to imbue social housing with civic dignity and sought to create a strong visual identity for the new town by giving it a monumental symbol at its entrance. Hence, he realised four large-scale housing projects in the Île de France region in the 70s and 80s, one of them being Les Espaces d’Abraxas in the nouvelle ville of Marne-la-Vallée, more specifically in Noisy-le-Grand. The complex is composed of three main buildings and houses a total of about 600 apartments: Le Palacio, 18 stories, with 441 units, and L’Arche, 10 stories, with 20 units, planned as social housing, and Le Théâtre, 9 stories, with 130 units available for purchase to private owners. 

Courtesy of bofill.com

Plans to tear down the complex in the 2010s were ultimately abandoned in favour of a large-scale rehabilitation project announced in 2018, which Ricardo Bofill would plan and oversee. He famously refused the mayor’s requests to come back to Noisy-le-Grand for a long time, calling the project a failure and refusing to speak of it or touch it again. Ultimately, he was convinced and took on the challenge of its rehabilitation, set to be finished by 2027. 

His plan included a project wherein residents became trained tour guides for the site: ten participated and composed a tour, each choosing one spot which was meaningful to their life within the structure to stop at. Samir Rouab still meets visitors in front of the community center for these guided tours every Sunday morning, including this rainy one in December. He moved here in the late 1980’s, he says, with his mother and siblings. Today, he lives here with a family of his own. Online, Tripadvisor and Google reviews detailing unpleasant or dangerous visitor experiences amass. In the beginning of our tour already, Samir asks us to be respectful and not film or photograph any residents. He speaks of his disdain with the negative image of the place being spread online. The structure, famed for its appearances in the Hunger Games, Brazil by Terry Gilliam or the music video for K-Pop artist Rosé’s “Number One Girl”, has grown to be somewhat of a tourist attraction, causing residents to become irritated when being filmed going about their daily lives by tourists. Architects Farrell and Furman posit the "unique combination of the romantic sublime and totalitarian awe", induced by the grand proportions and classical Roman, Greek and Baroque shapes in Les Espaces d'Abraxas, as a possible reason for its popularity as a "backdrop for dystopian feature films".

Postmodernism championed architectural symbolism, ornament and singularity as tools to communicate cultural values and give luxurious extravagance to social housing units, opposing the functional rationalism of the modernists. In this spirit, Bofill aimed for the structure’s neoclassical elements to evoke the image and air of antique edifices anchored in the collective subconscious. Realised in affordable and easily available prefabricated concrete, the entirety of the complex bears ornaments reminiscent of Greek and Roman temples and amphitheaters. Decorative slabs on the walls imply columns and arches and add a monumental quality to the exterior walls of the housing units. 

Standing in front of le Théâtre, the amphitheatre-like tiered ‘gardens’ sprawl out in front of you. Through a slit in the middle of the half-circle, framed by a portal, one can glimpse outside of the structure. You are exposed to what feels like a million gazes, or more precisely those of six hundred apartments’ residents. The gardens in the courtyard were, in Ricardo Bofill’s plan for the structure, intended to be covered in greenery and trees to contrast the heavy, neoclassical concrete buildings. The courtyard was meant to have a lighting concept which would adapt according to the time of day, season and busyness of the space. The ground floor of the Palacio was intended to be lined with shops.

Photographes – © Jacques Pavlovsky – © Grégori Civera

Bofill dreamed of an enclave in Noisy-le-Grand where social classes would mix and coexist harmoniously, meeting in a large, green space shielded from outside noise. In his understanding, each of the residents was to be an actor in their own lives and simultaneously a spectator of others’. He wished to place the ordinary activities of the complex’s working class residents in an extraordinary setting: the monumental backdrop to their daily lives was to change the way they carried themselves and fill them with pride of their reality. He stood firm in his conviction that luxury, beauty and individuality should not be a privilege reserved for the elite, but a standard of living accessible to everyone. One of his core principles in the ideation of the Espaces d’Abraxas was that no two apartment layouts within them were to be identical, a goal accomplished largely by use of mezzanines in the Palacio complex. 

The solution created a complex structure of half-floors: seen that the four elevators servicing the 441-unit building only lead to ‘full’ floors, a large portion of apartments is only accessible by taking an additional staircase up or down to the next half-level. The two sides of the building are connected by bridges. The resulting labyrinth of corridors is notoriously easy to hide and disappear in and makes police interventions tedious and difficult. The elevators that do exist, while already arguably insufficient, are perpetually broken and take days to fix, forcing residents to rely on the hazardously slippery and steep staircases to access their apartments- a continuous obstacle for those with limited mobility. Little light penetrates the deep and nested structure. 

Embracing the back end of the complex stands Le Théâtre with the privately owned apartments. It is an overabundantly lit and ventilated bow of one-way mirrored column-like protrusions and windows upon windows with white latticing facing the other two buildings. Here, the singular layouts of the apartments make the window bays fall randomly into kitchens or bedrooms, thrusting the intimacy usually contained in a private home onto center stage.

On the way up to the 18th floor of the Palacio, we ride the elevator with a woman. “It’s a monster”, she scoffs. She’s not exactly wrong. Nowadays, the ownership structure of the units is extremely fragmented- some units are privately owned, others are managed by one of two public housing providers. Ultimately, Samir says, they are a nightmare to manage. Currently, there are all of two building caretakers overseeing the 600 units spread across three buildings. We stop on a bridge connecting the two sides of the Palacio on its top floor. Paris is clearly visible in the distance. He tells me that this was the spot one of the residents had chosen- he’d come out here and smoke a cigarette looking out onto the city, whether he’d had a good or bad day, and spend a peaceful moment gazing into the distance. 

Unfortunately, Bofill’s utopian dream never came true. Seen that privately owned homes and social housing were in separate buildings, interaction ultimately barely occurred. According to residents, les riches au Théâtre, les pauvres au Palacio is the lived reality of the Espaces d’Abraxas- two entirely separate realities unfurl on the opposite ends of the complex. The gardens are sparsely planted, the tiered lawn of the amphitheatre is glisteningly green from the copious rainfall this morning. Apart from that, a few trees are spread across the courtyard. At night, the space is dimly lit. The planned storefronts in the Palacio were, needless to say, never built. The community center in the middle of the ground floor in the Palacio opened in 2021 as part of the rehabilitation plan. Samir says it was a huge improvement for residents of all generations. Where before, afternoons and weekends were spent hanging around the structure and wondering what to do, there are now workshops, activities and even trips organised to entertain and unite the community.

Accounts of residents’ opinions on Les Espaces d’Abraxas vary. Samir, for one, takes pride in living inside the architectural landmark he calls ‘a monster, but a monster of beauty’. He stresses that life here is by no means desolate and tells me about the big annual children’s Halloween celebration that unites all of Noisy-le-Grand in the courtyard every year, and how before the old primary school barely 200 meters outside the complex was torn down due to asbestos, he used to be able to watch his daughter playing in the schoolyard during breaks. When he speaks of Bofill’s vision and ideas for the place, of people picknicking on the lush, green terraced lawns under the eyes of hundreds of their neighbours, it sounds as though he were recounting a naïve tale of a fairy dreamland. In an interview, a woman asks that one imagine themselves living inside the obelisk on Place de la Concorde to comprehend what life here feels like. 

Meant to recall a Roman forum and placed on a hill to replicate the imposing effect of the Parthenon as one approaches the town, the exalted style of the structure inverts the historical symbolism of architecture. Its appearance evokes not domestic intimacy, but grandeur and spectacle. Ultimately, the question is whether an architecture of such scale and monumentality can be appropriated for residential use. The lived reality witnessed in the Espaces d’Abraxas seems to lean towards a no. Existing public spaces such as the courtyard, meant to be meeting points, remain largely unused; shared spaces of intermediate scale to encourage spontaneous neighbouring are unavailable. One chooses between exposure to everyone’s eyes in the civic-scaled amphitheater, or the secluded mini-dramas of six hundred private family lives. The actual realities of everyday life feel banished outside of the structure: the cars to the parking lot behind it, the swingset and playground outside, the circulation of residents to paths between the buildings, shielded from both sight and daylight. As I make my way back to exit the complex, I slip and fall on the wet, moss-lined pavement in front of Le Théâtre under the eyes of lord-knows-how-many residents preparing their Sunday lunches- I hope someone got a good laugh out of it. 

Bofill asks that whoever lives here identify with a Roman emperor or the main character of a Greek tragedy as they go about their everyday, yet ousts the actual scenes of their lives (park car, schlepp groceries, play) backstage. Furthermore, one must ask themselves whether they would wish to be observed to this extent as they socialise, circulate, live. Arguably, Bofill overestimates the power of the housing unit’s architectural form to transform the social conditions within. He relies on the inhabitant’s interpretive qualities, invoked by the style and ornament of the buildings, to create a desire for public visibility. De facto, the structure does not instill pride of their everyday in most residents but encourages hiding and retreating into privacy even more to avoid what feels like a million darting gazes. 

The formal symbols, contrary to the architect’s intention, do not invite optimistic meditations about the future, but instead recall an idealised and grand past in total juxtaposition to the place’s reality. For most of their existence, Les Espaces d’Abraxas have been a play unraveling which nobody wishes to watch in order to avoid confrontation with their own shortcomings- be it the architect who refuses to look back at his past ‘mistake’ or a public infrastructure which, once more, failed those it promised to create a home for.