La Villette

I had hoped to be more impressed with Parc La Villette.

The famous deconstructive* red folies do punctuate the park as advertised, but they seem to be ignored or taken for granted as background by the users of the park, as are the sculptures in the Luxembourg Garden.

The folies do have functions, a video center, arts plastiques, and so on. The people I saw were using them just as buildings. The same seemed true for the elaborated cross-cutting and conflicting circulation patterns; the theoretical niceties and complexities do not seem to be there for the users. Whatever its theoretical armature, the park's grammar is not deconstructive for its users.

As far as I could see, traditional park functions dominated and were not exceeded, nor made to reflect on themselves, nor made to show their multiplicity or their internal limits. This goes against the rationale given in the proposal for the park, but in a different way it shows that the design works, since, notwithstanding its supposed deconstructive panache, it does succeed in its assigned program of bringing together a great diversity of functions and locations.

If La Villette was supposed to put pressure on our notions of what a park should be or how it should be used, the people I saw using the park felt no such challenge. In the 1860s at Parc Buttes Chaumont they created a fantasy world of temples, caverns, and strange spaces separated from the normal world yet corresponding to its literary dreams. In the 1980s at Parc La Villette they tried to fragment the normal world with deconstructive gestures that make it self-conscious of its artificiality. But mundane reality wins; people bounce casual soccer balls off the invisibly deconstructive monuments.

The best part for me was the wandering path through the bamboo: like some areas of Central Park, it was its own world, an effective walled space, a "traditional" element.

I spent 5 hours in Le Notre's park at Vaux le Vicomte and could have spent much more, but one hour at La Villette already felt more than enough, though I stayed on longer out of duty. Was it my fault? Not knowing how to look or read it? Perhaps a deconstructive park hasn't been thought out enough yet. Still, if the citizens refuse to use it deconstructively, why should the theoreticians celebrate it?

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Three Parks