Interior of Les Halles Centrales

This photograph shows the newly built wonder Les Halles, the central food market of Paris. Napoleon III had rejected the architect’s initial design—a stone building topped with an iron roof—as too heavy and traditional (the emperor supposedly exclaimed, “It’s vast umbrellas I want, nothing more!”). The final design was audacious and thoroughly modern: ten massive but lightweight pavilions built of iron and glass. These were famously described by Émile Zola in his novel The Belly of Paris (1873) as “a metal Babylon, with a Hindu lightness, crossed by suspended terraces, aerial corridors, flying bridges thrown over the void.” The pavilions remained in use until 1969, when the market was moved outside the city. They were torn down in 1973—one critic called it an act of “architectural homicide.”