PARIS, July 6 — When it comes to renovating Les Halles — the troubled
neighborhood, nicknamed the belly of Paris, which for generations
supplied the city with food — the appropriate motto might well be: If at
first you fail, keep trying.
Certainly, since its elegant 19th-century steel-and-glass markets were
torn down in the early 1970s and the wholesale food distributors moved
to the Paris suburbs, failure has been the zone’s leitmotif. The
so-called Forum and the gardens that replaced the 12 pavilions have
never been popular, but efforts to replace them have often stumbled.
Now the Paris government is trying again. This month Mayor Bertrand
Delanoë unveiled the winners of the latest architecture competition for
a new Forum. And the pledge is that the project, expected to cost 120
million euros ($163 million), will be completed by 2012.
If it really is built, the design by Patrick Berger and Jacques
Anziutti, two French architects experienced in working in Paris,
anticipates creating new commercial and cultural spaces beneath a vast
glass roof, variously described as a canopy, layered leaves or a shell
but perhaps most evocative of the undulating movements of a manta ray.
cont'd....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/arts/design/07hall.html?_r=1&ref=arts&oref=slogin