Designers Prepare Les Halles for a Facelift

It has been described as a monstrous carbuncle blighting Paris - a cross between a cluster of giant mirror-glassed mushrooms and an airless underground shopping mall.

But, after years of legal-wrangling and architectural debate, the modernist Les Halles complex in central Paris is finally on course for a facelift.

Once a collection of wrought-iron pavilions housing the city's wholesale market, the writer Emile Zola called this area "the belly of Paris". But after the market was demolished in the late 1960s, leaving a giant hole for most of the 1970s, followed by then Paris mayor Jacques Chirac's modernist vision, it has more often been likened to the city's backside.

The Forum des Halles is now a giant transport hub, with its massive intersection of suburban railway and metro serving 800,000 people a day. Its four-floor subterranean shopping complex, topped with a modernist greenhouse-style glass structure and tatty gardens attract more than 40m visitors a year.

But with a reputation for drug dealers, and nearby strip bars, the complex in the shadow of the Pompidou centre has been accused of seriously damaging Paris's image.

Paris's Socialist mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, has vowed to "correct the mistakes of the past" with a makeover and redesign. But with two architectural competitions that sparked legal arguments, design debates and fears amid local residents, he called it one of the most sensitive architectural projects he had ever handled.

Yesterday two French architects, Patrick Berger et Jacques Anziutti, unveiled their plans for a giant "glass shell" 11 meters above ground which will top the new-look center. At the heart of central Paris where residents long for green space, the large glass roof called "The Canopy" was said to be inspired by a forest canopy of trees and will sit amid a 4.3 hectare garden.

"This was a consensus choice," said the mayor of Paris's first arrondissement Jean-François Legaret. "It's original, a little audacious and certainly poetic."