For Carl Jung, the god Abraxas represented the driving psychological force of individuation, a mature understanding of oneness that reconciled conflicting desires. ‘Abraxas standeth above the sun and above the devil. It is improbable probability, unreal reality,’ he wrote of the Gnostic deity.
The Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill must have come across the name in Jung’s book Seven Sermons to the Dead, written by Jung in seclusion during the First World War. Why he chose to give it to the now famous 600 unit ensemble of distended, gargantuan neo-Classical set pieces in Marne La Vallée near Paris, built in the late 1970s, is another, more intriguing, matter.
'As one might expect from its name, L’Espaces D’Abraxas is a deeply, deeply weird place'
As one might expect from its name, L’Espaces D’Abraxas is a deeply, deeply weird place. It stands in a banlieue of Paris, but where one might expect a Modernist monolith, it is divided into three closely related, supposedly ‘Classical’ forms: the Palacio, the Theatre and the Arch.
Instead of obfuscating or hiding the contradictions inherent in its design and execution, the architecture amplifies them. In 1965 a master plan was adopted for the Île-de-France region around Paris that would incorporate five new towns, a regional express network (RER), and a suburban motorway in order to channel rapid growth. The plan's aim was to de-centralise the region and develop autonomous centres. By the time Bofill was designing Abraxas, the new towns had become dormitory settlements and the decentralisation that they promised to cure, was in fact profoundly embedded. The banlieues of Paris are the least autonomous places in Europe.
The model for an English suburb is generally a village; partly because of the way in which London or Manchester expanded to subsume outlying settlements. Land ownership patterns, ad hoc housing policy and the rule of common law encourage it. This is not the case with Paris; the form of which has been determined by land nationalisation, massive urban plans and state action since the 19th century. That is when the political class finally acted.
'If you were lucky you worked in Paris, and slept in your dormitory apartment. If you weren’t, you rotted'
It wasn’t until the 1950s that the slums and shantytowns around its periphery were addressed. The solution, in the hands of the modern state and Modernist architecture, were the grands ensembles, which provided good facilities, individual toilets and central heating, but, built by a bureaucracy in highly segregated land parcels, these utterly failed to provide communities — not even a flat roofed estate pub or a rinky-dink shopping precinct. If you were lucky you worked in Paris, and slept in your dormitory apartment. If you weren’t, you rotted.
This being France the issue became highly intellectualised. In 1968, Henri Lefebvre published Right to the City, which addressed the condition. While acknowledging that the new buildings addressed the individuals' right to shelter, they did not grant them the right to appropriate their home and make it their own. ‘Large housing estates achieve the concept of habitat, by excluding the notion of inhabit that is the plasticity of space, its modelling and the appropriation by groups and individuals of the conditions of their existence,’ he wrote. The grand ensembles stripped the working classes of their agency. It provided habitation, but didn’t allow them to inhabit it: that is adapt it, own it and make it theirs.
'At the ground floor, the scale is imposing, but as one moves up into the building it is more intimate, indeed sophisticated'
The playful neo-Classical set pieces on full display. Note the columns as stairwells in the Theatre on the left, and how other Classical architectural forms are presented almost as negatives, such as the 'absent' columns at the bottom of the banister on the right.
This was the cultural and philosophical bind Bofill found himself in. He was designing for a planning and construction system that demanded a big building close to a key station on the RER, 18 minutes from Gare de Lyon. Bofill’s line that he was building a Versailles for the people in Noisy-le Grand wasn’t just marketing. If, said Bofill, the housing estate erodes consciousness of the city and the autonomy that it presupposes, then there are other important structures that aren't part of Paris either, such as the palace built by Louis XIV, which is what the Classical form of Abraxas is supposed to be.
Is it a palace for the people? In a way. Although the façade of the Palacio may look like a foreboding Stalinist wall, with its steroidal entablature and hyper-inflated colonnade — the Doric columns are emergency stairwells — the interior is relatively open. At the ground floor, the scale is imposing, but as one moves up into the building it is more intimate, indeed sophisticated. Pre-cast panelling with subtle reliefs create a softer, less declamatory Classical language. The designs of the apartments are extraordinary too, although most demand the tenant be able to use stairs. Duplexes are stacked off central walkways. This system creates balconies on upper levels which sit on the roofs of apartments, a tactic used in Bofill’s earlier housing in Barcelona.
It may not be on the top of everyone’s list when visiting Paris, but Abraxas’s ‘unreal reality’ is an intriguing solution to how you expand a city using unwieldy machinery.
View of the Arch and the Palacio from the Theatre.