The Space of the Stomach – Rungis, Ile de France, 1969/c 2009 Meredith TenHoor
Photograph of market buildings at Rungis, 1968. Source: Techniques et Architecture 30, no. 3 (1969): 88.
Anyone who eats in Paris consumes traces of the Rungis International Wholesale Market, a filter and conduit for most food that enters the region. Rungis opened in 1969 as a replacement for Central Paris’s obsolescent food markets at Les Halles. Designed by Beaux-Arts trained architects Henri Colboc and Georges Philippe, Rungis was a testament to centralization, technocratic planning, reinforced concrete and machine operated modernity. In the 1960s, planners dreamed that it would not just put an end to the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions at Les Halles but also, through the use of both regulation and information technologies, make food into a cheap, standardized commodity. This would in turn leave room in household budgets for purchases of other consumer goods. Something decidedly not natural would make way for new modes of consumption. Sustaining life cheaply shifted the ground of politics from bodies to desire. Rungis would be a catalyst for the transition from a Fordist to a yet-to-bearticulated post-Fordist regime. The market is a place where the biopolitics of food are articulated in space and time, where architectural decision-
making transforms the art of sustenance. Rungis is entirely present inside Parisian bodies, and necessary to sustain them. But Rungis market itself is some distance outside of the city, located anonymously behind Orly airport, invisible and undetectable to all but the people who work there. What is this unnatural place that defines one of our most primary means of accessing nature? What follows is a brief tour.
The bus drops off passengers at the “Restaurant Bridge,” a place once meant to be a panoramic showcase of the market for tourists. That program has long since been abandoned; a market as functional as Rungis seems no place for leisure. Fortunately for the hungry, someone is selling croissants from a kiosk below.
1
1 I have described how Rungis transformed consumption in France in the following articles: “Decree, Design, Exhibit, Consume: Making Modern Markets in France, 1953-79” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, eds. Arindam Dutta, Timothy Hyde, Daniel M. Abramson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, Spring 2012, and “Architecture and Biopolitics at Les Halles” French Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 25 Issue 2, 2007.
54
Courtesy RATP, 2005.
Tourists are not generally allowed in Rungis market; you can’t simply drive in. The easiest way to visit is to follow people who work there. They take the 216 bus. It slips through Paris without stopping, hops on the highway, slides through a thicket of unmarked corporate buildings and abandoned construction sites. There is a pause alongside an empty field. Office workers and a few women with children descend and purposefully walk to invisible destinations. You finally reach Rungis a few moments later.
Plans for a panoramic restaurant at Rungis, c 1972. Source: Archives Départementales du Val-de-Marne, Créteil, France, archive 2447 W, box 667.
55