Les Halles Lollipops

Les Halles Lollipops
Originally uploaded by tmonkey.

I remember the first time I went to Paris as a wide-eyed 15-year-old, the thing that stuck with me was shopping for shoes in Les Halles. I wanted a new pair of cool euro kicks after coming to the realization that, in fact, all of my clothes were so tired and unfashionably american. One's first trip to Europe usually does that. I rummaged around the bins filled with shirts, shoes, and trousers, negotiating the chaos of Arabic and French hawkers, finally settling on a stylish rubber soled suede number with orange stitching. I can't remember how much they cost me but I remember they were fairly cheap, and I wore them proudly for the remainder of our time in Paris. That is until the blisters became so excruciating that I had to reconsider seriously my newfound commitment to Parisian fashion.

But I always had fond memories of the unkempt urban grit that cut the richness of the pristine, monumental places/plazas of Paris. Well, Paris decided that they need to reconsider this "urban blight" and threw a competition. Among the proposals, the Koolhaas plan was by far the most interesting but actually quite orthodox for Rem (the cross-hatched exoskeleton is nearing Gehry's titanium curves in predictability) but interesting does not win competitions these days (ah, where did the 90s go?). Boring, staid, and inoffensive wins the lesser-of-four-evils architectural competitions these days.