Ricardo Bofill: Les Espaces d'Abraxas, Marne-la-Vallée, 1978-82 (A ten-story amphitheatre is evenly divided into three visual storeys and are paired, giving a pleasing rhythm between windows; vertical circulation is behind fluted "Art Deco" engaged columns the full ten storeys. The large vs. small Order was a Michelangelesque motif and Bofill has been known to compare himself, modestly, to this character - Charles Jencks, Postmodern Architecture, p. 161.)

Ricardo Bofill on Abraxas

Les Espaces d'Abraxas, a complex consisting of Le Théâtre, Le Palacio and L'Arc, was conceived as a point of reference in the landscape, an inhabited monument in the context of the ville-nouvelle of Marne-La-Vallée and the result of a form of planning totally alien to the system of urban zoning that became the norm after World War II. The central space, in the form of a lawn-covered plaza and limited by the surrounding buildings, is all-embracing like a genuine open-air theatre. Mastery of concrete structures and of the system of prefabricated façades made it possible to use a comprehensive and highly complex architectural idiom. Although the methodology employed for Les Espaces d'Abraxas is related to previous projects by the Taller de Arquitectura, especially Walden-7 in Barcelona or La Petite Cathédrale in Cergy-Pontoise, this work is nonetheless the first volumetric exercise in space of such large dimensions. This proposed alternative to anonymous constructions in the suburbs is an example of how the team has managed to embrace different scales of architecture, from the conception of the basic volumes of the complex to the design of façades and urban furniture.

Program 591 dwellings and public spaces.

Client Le Palacio: CNH 2000. Le Théâtre and L'Arc: SAd'HLM, Les Trois Vallées
Gross area 47,000 m2

Ricardo Bofill: Taller de Arquitectura - Homepage

Charles Jencks on Abraxas

[...] Here [as in Bofill's Les Arcades du Lac near Versailles] modern concrete is used to do heavy Baroque tricks; again urban space is nicely moulded to form an enclosed "theatre" that steps down to a large "arch" and densely planted "arbre". But the handling of the classical language and technology is more sure. Nine-storey fluted glass columns alternate with pilasters of masonry and carry a triple capital of planting surmounted by a cypress tree! Is it the New Corinthian Order? Will giant, hormone-injected acanthus leaves shoot out of the six-foot high planters?

Charles Jencks, Postmodern Architecture, pp. 161-62.

Ricardo Bofill: Les Espaces d,Abraxas, Marne-la-Vallée, 1978-82 (a theatrical urban complex in the new town of Marne-la-Vallée, contains [674] dwellings in buildings whose shapes reflect their names: constructed on an axis, the U-shaped Le Palais and semicircular Le Théâtre, enclose a central open space in which the triumphal arch L’Arc is located - Grove Art Online)

Peter Hodgkinson on the Technological Classicism of Abraxas

Much of Post-Modern Classical revivalism is a fad pretending to relate to the past. The Marne-la-Vallée complex relates to the future. It is the Cape Canaveral of the Classical space age, the return to a people's ritual.

Peter Hodgkinson, Architectural Review, June 1982.

Grove Art Online on Bofill's multi-storey residential complexes

The design of these multi-storey residential complexes, whose enclosed plazas are the antithesis of the fluid, abstract spaces of modernist urban planning, was based on classical rules, but interpreted with an absolute freedom that constantly transgressed the language, proportion and scale of canonical classicism, producing elements that are often distorted and enlarged to create a disturbing colossalism. The blocks were increasingly built with the use of industrialized construction techniques such as prefabricated concrete and curtain walling systems. Bofill’s re-creation of classical urban space with its emphasis on monumentality made him one of the most important exponents of Post-modernism; the architecture of his residential complexes has more to do with meaning than with other architectural values.

Grove Art Online

Charles Jencks on the revolutionary message of Abraxas

[...] Bofill and the Taller have shown that mass-production is not necessarily tied to any language of form - the machine aesthetic, as has been argued this century. The greatest orthodoxy of our time, that the fabrication process leads to an inevitable industrial style, is shown to be false. There must be several possible languages of mass-production and, as the Egyptians discovered, Free-Style Classicism is one of them.

Charles Jencks, Postmodern Architecture, p. 146.

Miscelleanous:

Computer Graphics by Mitsuiki Ishi Architect

Links:

• Viennaslide: 14 photos of Abraxas
• Karl-Heinz Pfleging: Ricardo Bofill and "Tallier de Architecture"
• Ricardo Bofill: Taller de Arquitectura - Homepage
• Archidose: Taller de Arquitectura
• Mitsuiki Ishi: Computer Graphics of Abraxas