After visiting these locales, you feel completely removed from the Paris the world “thinks” they know. Rather, you’ve glimpsed a sort of future that never happened. It comes as no surprise that film director Terry Gilliams chose Les Espaces d’Abraxas as a backdrop for his famous movie Brazil, a satirical look at a bureaucratic, largely dysfunctional future world.

One must recognize though that these buildings met their intended goal–making it possible to accommodate many people quickly and at a reasonable cost. But a hardly describable atmosphere of disarray and boredom reigns there. Thirty years after construction, deteriorating prefabricated modules combined with negligent maintenance make the ornamental details look like cheap versions of themselves. In the end, these projects are yet another utopian attempt by modern architects to find solutions to economic and social issues through design. Focusing exclusively on form, they failed to create a sense of place, producing environments that are all but vibrant. Le Viaduc for example embodies a sort of idealized neighborhood with large green spaces and no cars, but feels deprived of the essential ingredients of urbanity. However, it would not be fair to leave out the opinions of the residents themselves in this discussion. A few years ago, Noisy-le-Grand municipality contemplated tearing down Les Espaces d’Abraxas, an initiative that was vigorously fought by the community. While complaining about inhuman scale, bad maintenance and the scarcity of nearby shopping options, they paradoxically seem to be attached to their place. Undeniably outdated, these buildings remain food for thought for urban planners and designers.

Most well known for mashing up his two home cities, New York and Paris in “What if Manhattan Was Design liked Paris?”, Charles-Antoine Perrault is also a graduate student in urban planning at Columbia University.  

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