Liberalism, Sovereignty and Emancipation: Designing A Contemporary Palais Royal for Les Halles in 1974

This paper analyses the complex power struggle at play in one of Paris’ most emblematic urban renewal projects at the dawn of the neoliberal turn. Architecture played a decisive synthesizing role in this struggle that spanned, gentrification processes, and the rediscovery of the historic city as a site of resistance against modernization agendas. In September 1974, this debate took a decisive turn towards postmodernity as the newly elected President Valérie Giscard d’Estaing launched an invited competition for the Plateau Des Halles. Its entries were to both articulate Giscard’s new architecture politics and address the loss of collective identity caused by the relocation of Paris’ wholesale food market Les Halles to the southern banlieue in 1969. The president’s selection of Ricardo Bofill—Taller de Arquitectura’s neobaroque garden sequence as the winning entry sparked another political battle over Les Halles in a debate that intertwined party politics of French liberalism with the discourses surrounding postmodern urbanism. Drawing on archival evidence, this paper situates Bofill’s 1974 competition project within its historical and political contexts and uncovers the governmental strategies surrounding the competition within Paris’ ministerial bureaucracy. On the one hand, the project exemplified Giscard’s urban politics of “advanced liberalism”, which merged liberalism with authoritarian governance, implemented the retreat of the state from the politics of social redistribution, and anticipated the rise of designers in shaping urban marketing strategies. On the other hand, Bofill’s 1974 design for Les Halles epitomized the French discourse of “architecture urbaine” that understood the return to historic urban forms as an emancipation from technocratic and economic constraints. Taller de Arquitectura’s design synthesized these antagonistic political goals: it both embodied and resisted political instrumentalization.