Bastille spirit.

Bastille, in the eastern part of Paris, is one of the city's most densely populated and run-down quarters, with a large North African immigrant population. Through the auspices of the Grands Projects, the area has gained at least one new monument in the Brobdingnagian form of Carlos Ott's Opera de la Bastille (AR August 1989), but it is doubtful if many of its patrons come from rue de Candie, a narrow back street just off the arterial rue Faubourg-Saint-Antoine. Here, among the tightly packed flats and carpenters' workshops, a gentler kind of urban transformation is in progress, more concerned with providing public amenities for the indigenous population than with inflated gestures. Yet despite such worthy underlying intentions, the architectural outcome is far from dull.

The programme for civic improvements was originally initiated by the Ville de Paris, through the RIVP (Regie Immobiliere de la Ville de Paris). For the past 15 years Michel Lombardini, its director, has maintained an enlightened and far-reaching policy of commissioning young, often foreign architects for a range of public works. The project in rue de Candie was entrusted to the Italian Massimiliano Fuksas in 1987 and involves the comprehensive redevelopment of a narrow city block by introducing a mixture of housing, sports facilities, public gardens and parking. In this relatively undistinguished Parisian backwater, Fuksas has chosen to tread carefully. Although the surrounding urban fabric is fragmented, it does have a fragile homogeneity that could easily be distorted by an overbearing and unconsidered intervention.

The problem of integrating large volumes, such the sports hall and car park, is solved decisively by placing them underground, leaving the surface free for use as external sports courts. Solids and voids are intelligently layered and manipulated, so that nothing is quite what it seems. On the rue de Candie, for example, strips of glazing at pedestrian eye level give glimpses into the secret subterranean cavern of the indoor sports hall below.

The scheme is dominated by a block of flats that runs along the rue Charles Delescluze to the north, reinforcing the street edge in terms of scale and typology. Yet materially, Fuksas' new housing is very different, with its metal-clad, gently aerodynamic profile, like a melting mansard roof. To the rear of the block, the undulating volume crashes down into the site, like a frozen tsunami or a furled computer print-out. The zinc-clad peaks and troughs are echoed in the curved concrete end walls of the sports hall which are punctuated with blind windows, as if they were fragments from an imaginary city, recently exhumed. On one of the walls is a suitably primordial image of a stylised sun setting behind mountains, painted by the Italian artist Enzo Cucchi. Strips of clerestory glazing filter light in from all four sides, through the deliberately dislocated structure. The underground hall is spanned by a series of deep concrete beams supporting the roof which doubles as an external sports court. The playing surface is enclosed by a high-wire mesh fence that juts out at a precipitous angle into the rue de Candie, like a dynamic ship's prow. From West Side Story onwards, the mesh fence conjures up instant urban associations, of snatched moments of recreation in yards and on rooftops, yet it also screens and diffuses the presence of the city.

A curiously hard edged, ad-hoc spirit runs through the entire scheme, with its bitingly raw materiality of concrete and zinc. Unlike the overblown monumentality of some Parisian projets, Fuksas' modest configuration is imbued with a certain elusive, almost temporary quality, as if to consciously identify it with the slowly changing flux of city life where elements are continuously overlaid, destroyed and mutated. There is no single vantage point from which to observe the project in its entirety. Instead it appears as a disjointed sequence of slightly perplexing images, but each referring to one another in the manner of a film strip. From the beginning, Fuksas' insertions have slotted and blended quite naturally into their context. Here architecture is not isolated, but a series of intense impressions that attempt to reactivate and re-engage the latent energy of the surroundings.