Manuel Núñez Yanowsky and Ricardo Bofill

Les Arènes de Picasso, 1985, Noisy-le-Grand, France, by Manuel Núñez Yanowsky

postmodern architecture

photography by GIANNI OPRANDI
text by JOHN JEFFERSON SELVE

 

In the 1980s, the postmodern Spanish architects, Manuel Núñez Yanowsky and Ricardo Bofill, were chosen to build two public projects in Noisy-le-Grand, near Paris: Les Arènes de Picasso and Les Espaces d’Abraxas. Their initial idea was to create an alternative to the failures of the rational urban planning of the ’60s and ’70s. The architects used all kinds of references, from Roman mythology to science fiction, to create phantasmagorical environments. Thirty years later, certain detractors consider these ambitious constructions part of the persistent social problems throughout the underprivileged Parisian suburbs. Now, however, at a time when architectural innovation is used mostly for luxury buildings and art institutions, it’s important to be reminded that these projects were conceived as a…