Form Follows Fantasy

Who can truly claim to live in a palace? Few, beyond monarchs, royal families, their ever-present staff, and the occasional member of an ultra-wealthy elite with enough fortune and influence to buy a title, or at least the appearance of one. What of a theatre? Those who spend their lives upon its stage – actors, dancers, comedians – might call it a second home, but they don’t reside in the theatre, not in any conventional sense. As for a triumphal arch – surely no one could claim to live there; it’s a monument, not a home, a declaration of victory over an enemy or a commemoration of a battle long past.

If you’re familiar with Les Espaces d’Abraxas(1) – or simply “Abraxas” as it’s often called – you’ll understand why I pose these scenarios. There, the thousands of residents can all genuinely say they live in either a palace, a theatre, or a triumphal arch, because the apartment blocks of Abraxas are named and shaped in the image of these classical architectural forms: Le Palais, Le Théâtre, and L'Arc de Triomphe.

While the idea of buildings that look like other buildings – or, indeed, like animals (Calatrava), spacecraft (Hadid), or food (half of Las Vegas) – may seem perfectly ordinary today, it was a radically new concept at the time Abraxas was constructed in Marne-la-Vallée. Up until that point, which was the early 1980s, French government-subsidised housing had been trapped in the monotony of a certain sensible functionalism. The “slab block” was the default: long, grey concrete corridors, identical rows of doors and windows, and floors that repeated ad nauseam.

This style – or rather, the absence of one – emerged in the 1920s and,(2) in the wake of World War II, rapidly gained momentum across the housing sector. Because cities were flattened during the war, millions were displaced, pushed out of urban centres into the expanding suburbs. Slab blocks were the quickest, cheapest, most efficient way to house several hundreds of these families, hence their becoming the go-to solution.

But functional architecture too often came at the expense of spirit. “Form follows function”,(4) the guiding mantra of the Modern Movement, had dictated that a building’s design should be subservient to the activities it housed. Fine. But this was taken to mean that ornament, colour, joy – frankly anything that might be considered unnecessary or extraneous – was also to be avoided, and avoided at all costs.(5) As history goes, the message was muddied and simplified, and the triumph of many early Modern buildings was nowhere to be seen in the later landscape of bare efficiency – its buildings stripped of character and individuality.

And so, by the mid-1960s in Paris, the housing crisis had morphed into something more profound: an architectural crisis. This was now a search for the very soul of the city, on top of what was an already desperate need for simple shelter. The then-president Charles de Gaulle, sensing the situation was inching towards total collapse, swiftly assembled a team of the greatest urbanists, engineers, architects, and planners in France. Their task: to create a series of new towns that could absorb the burgeoning suburban sprawl around the capital(6) . They were to do so through a vision not just functional but, ideally, humane.

To find answers, the team needed first to escape the grip of France’s architectural establishment, then dominated by a few “dignitaries from the Modern Movement” and the esteemed École des Beaux-Arts.(7) The team turned its gaze south, across the Spanish border to Barcelona where Ricardo Bofill and his architecture workshop were making waves with their unconventional, near utopian social housing projects.(8)

These were buildings that defied normal housing standards: there were less apartments, more complex modulated structures resembling honeycombs, termite mounds, or the ancient warren of a forgotten city. They broke from the monotonous block and sought to revive the communal spirit and customs of Spain, with places to meet and converse, to stroll, to sit in the sun or argue – spaces designed for life, not mere survival. In projects like Walden 7 and Barrio Gaudí,(9) these traditional qualities mingled with surrealist and futurist imagery, offering proposals for an entirely new way of living, one that looked backwards and forwards in equal measure.

The Taller’s vision seemed to align effortlessly with that of the French, earning the architects the commission for social housing projects in two of the five proposed new towns.(10) One of these sites was located in Marne-la-Vallée, ten kilometres outside of Paris. Its brief called for a “monument-project” to give the new neighbourhood an architectural identity, or “a symbol that was both striking and representative.”(11) The Taller's initial designs were developed from the cubist concepts that had generated La Ciudad en el Espacio, with facades inspired by another very different project, Les Arcades du Lac, creating a grand gesture that would cut across the landscape. The overall composition took its cues from the orderly axes of boulevards, formal gardens, and the nearby grandeur of Versailles to create an architecture other than that for which the Taller was recognised.

This was a shift towards contextualism – or “city-based morphology” – which could be felt well outside the grounds of La Fábrica. It marked a generational change, later dubbed “Postmodernism”, the catch-all term for various reactions to the failures of Modern architecture: its inability to generate compelling public space, its breakdown in communication, and, perhaps most pointedly, its loss of meaning. This new movement would gather around a “richer language” based on metaphor, historical imagery, and wit, suggesting that classical architectural vocabulary could be perverted or subverted, and that its qualities extended far beyond traditional archetypes.(12)

Fuelled by this international change in appetite, the Taller adopted a fresh approach and issued a second round of plans for Marne-la-Vallée.(13) Now that function no longer appeared to bind form, the apartment units could be poured freely into the shells of those three classical building typologies: the palace, the theatre, and the triumphal arch. The employment of these distinct archetypes intended to impart their dramatic spatial qualities on affordable dwellings, hopefully providing residents with a heightened sense of living. Meanwhile, the cubism that had defined the Taller’s earlier work made way for a playful collage of Greek, Roman, and Baroque motifs, where colossal Doric columns became fire-escape stairwells and cypress trees adorned the facades like classical friezes.(14)

Construction of such an acropolis would be no small feat – plus the Taller was working with a modest budget to keep apartment prices subsidised. The (neo-)neoclassical vocabulary had to therefore be adapted to an industrialised building system, something that only a concrete factory outside Lyon, originally developed for nuclear power plants, could master. Over the course of two years, prefabricated facade panels with unrecognisably faux finishes of marble and limestone were prototyped and perfected by this factory using oxide colouring, relief work – the whole works. These panels were then transported to the site by lorry and hoisted into place by tower cranes,(15) a technical spectacle right before the eyes of the new town's new residents.

As Le Palais, Le Théâtre, and L'Arc de Triomphe rose above the surrounding motorways, subways, car parks, and office blocks, the buildings earned titles including Edifices for Everyman and Palatial Pleasures for Urban Masses.(16) Read as a whole, their actual name was "Abraxas", a word that carries a rich depth of meaning: Abraxas is an ancient charm constructed from Greek letters; it also represents a supreme Gnostic deity, ruler of the 365 circles of creation, one for each day of the year.(17)

Embedded within this latter definition is the idea that each day is a miniature cycle of life and death. Naming a housing estate as such might seem like an extreme position to take – especially when the more common lived experience during the 1980s (a behemoth of a decade in neoliberal terms) was one of nine-to-fives, much the same, Groundhog Day.

The Taller knew this. With Les Espaces d’Abraxas, the group was suggesting something else entirely, offering an invitation to residents – and to tired architectural rhetoric alike – to “break free from the mediocrity of the everyday”.(18) It was through grandiosity, theatrics, and occasion that the Taller sought to reinvigorate the mundane architecture of mass housing. Arguably, the group succeeded.