Parc de la Villette
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Parc de La Villette

All the meat for Paris used to come from La Villette. Slaughtering and butchering, and industries based on the meat markets' by-products, provided plenty of jobs for its dense population, whose recreation time was spent betting on cockfights, skating or swimming, and eating in the numerous local restaurants famed for their fresh meat. In the 1960s, vast sums of money were spent building a vast new abattoir. Yet, just as it neared completion, the emergence of new refrigeration techniques rendered the centralized meat industry redundant. The only solution was to switch course entirely: billions continued to be poured into La Villette in the 1980s, with the revised aim of creating a music, art and science complex to blow the mind.

The end result, the Parc de la Villette, which opened in 1986, is enormous in scope and volume. There's so much going on here, most of it stimulating and entertaining, but it's all so disparate and disconnected, with such a clash of styles, that it can feel more overwhelming than inspiring. According to the park's creators, this is all intentional, and philosophically justified. It was conceived by Bernard Tschumi as a futuristic "activity" park that would dispel the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notion of parks and gardens as places of gentle and well-ordered relaxation. Instead, we're offered a landscape that backs off from the old-fashioned idea of unity, meaning and purpose, that "deconstructs" the whole into its fragmented elements, thereby opening up numerous possible interpretations. Yet there's something vaguely disconcerting about the setting. The 900-metre straight walkway, with its wavy shelter and complicated metal bridge across the Canal de l'Ourcq, seems to insist that you cover the park from end to end, and there's something too dogmatic about the arrangement of the bright red follies like chopped-off cranes, each slightly different but all spaced exactly 120m apart. The park's focal point, the Cité des Sciences, is alarming for its sheer bulk.