On our way back to Paris from Maison Carré, we made a detour to Les Arcades du Lac, the housing complex designed by Ricardo Bofill.

Even on satellite view, it appears striking: vast in scale, clearly axial, and in distant dialogue with the gardens of Versailles. This was no coincidence. In the 1970s, as France sought to relieve housing pressure in Paris, a series of new towns were planned around the capital. Designing on an almost blank site is never easy. Bofill looked towards Versailles and created, at a reduced scale, a piece of social housing arranged like a French formal garden, with grand axes and an expansive lake.

Seen today, the project carries a certain period innocence. The architect hoped to give an empty site a sense of urban memory, and to improve everyday life through beauty and monumentality. Yet what residents often need most is less heroic: a café downstairs, a small grocery with fresh vegetables, a bookshop where one can linger, the smell of bread in the morning.

These ordinary, “non-architectural” elements are what make life real. Social housing should perhaps make such scenes possible, but they are precisely the messy, uncontrolled things often ignored by architects pursuing perfect systems. Today, the residential streets feel rather empty; only the lakeside, where locals walk their dogs, seems genuinely alive.

This is not solely Bofill’s fault. The new towns of 1970s France were shaped by speed, cost and functional zoning. Small commerce requires ownership, management, rent control, deliveries, noise negotiation and long-term operation. None of this can be solved by a beautiful masterplan.

Compared with Bofill’s more troubled housing schemes in eastern Paris, this “Versailles for ordinary people” still feels safe, quiet and habitable. It is a beautiful Ideal City on paper: solemn, ambitious, even redemptive. Yet perhaps it remains, above all, an image.