Paris long had a belly at its center: the central market, in French les halles.

glassceiling
In the 19th century, twelve pavilions housed the markets, pictured here in Victor Baltard and Félix Gallet’s Monographie des Halles Centrales de Paris (1863).
In the 1970s, a massive urban renewal project took out the market and put in a commuter train station and a shopping complex. The commuter train station has not weathered the test of time well. Public safety especially seems lacking; there may be secret exits that I’ve never seen, but I can’t imagine how the station could be evacuated at rush hour, for example in case of fire. The shopping complex, managed by Unibail-Rodamco, welcomes huge crowds of shoppers. Therein lies a paradox: the shopping complex seems to be a Paris destination for suburbanites, but is so crowded that some Parisians –like me!– take pains to avoid it.
the City of Paris will soon be filing a building permit to undertake major renovations to the site, which expected to be finished in 2013. The project has been dubbed the Canopy –Canopée– and its lead architects are Patrick Berger and Jacques Arziutti.
The signature element of the Canopy is a giant glass roof. As I see it, the Canopy design will give the complex less of a sunken, subterranean feel. What I can’t measure from artists’ drawings is how this massive, undulating roof will alter the look and feel of central Paris.