[9][11] In 2018, the commune of Noisy-le-Grand announced that Bofill would oversee the renovation of Les Espaces d'Abraxas and of a number of nearby developments, including new construction.

[2] The building is accessible via the Réseau Express Régional (RER), which travels directly from the centre of Paris (Gare de Lyon) to Noisy-le-Grand – Mont d'Est station.

[1] To manage this increased urbanisation, the French government began to implement various national programs to address housing shortages[4] and move some of the population out of Paris.

[16] These towns were the focus of increased infrastructure, with the aim of aiding "employment and service growth" in the suburbs and diversifying the population on the outskirts of Paris.

[5] Originally designed in 1978, two years into the Seventh National Plan, Les Espaces d'Abraxas is situated in the Noisy-le-Grand region, within the 'New Town' of Marne-la-Vallée.

[17] At the time of construction, Noisy-le-Grand was a part of the Ceinture rouge (Red Belt), falling within the then French Communist Party-led council of Seine-Saint-Denis.

[1] Unlike the other 'New Towns' which sought to concentrate residents into one area and create infrastructure around it, Marne-la-Vallée was "to be a series of small scale settlements based upon existing communes and around transport connections (road and rail)".

[20] Originally attending the Barcelona School of Architecture, he was expelled in 1957 due to his radical left wing beliefs that were contrary to the regime of then dictator Francisco Franco.

[20][21] In 1968, the firm proposed an architectural design entitled the 'City in Space' as a "kind of manifesto in reaction to the pressing demands of a society in constant transformation".

[24] Aspects of this early design and its ideology remained prominent in Bofill's work, including idea's of "realisable utopia", "mega-structural character, systems of aggregation, agglomeration and mixture" and "revolutionary action".

[10] The RBTA website, on the construction of Les Espaces d'Abraxas: "The façades were built from prefabricated sections, cut according to their individual shapes and not in framed panels, so that the joints are invisible.

[10] In the decades following World War II, architectural designs began to reuse the aesthetic languages of "past avant-gardes, notably Russian Constructivism"[26] as a symbolic way to "indicate a rediscovered vigour and confidence"[26] and nationalism.

[26] This communal space was key to Bofill, as he intended for Les Espaces d'Abraxas to "mix social categories" and create community spirit.

[7] The invention of new technologies, like prefabricated concrete, combined with classical motifs allowed a "pseudo luxurious extravagance" to be achieved that was traditionally withheld only for the upper classes.

[10] In 2019, critic Owen Hatherley discussed Les Espaces d'Abraxas in his article The good, the bad and the ugly – neoclassical architecture in modern times for the international art magazine Apollo.

[28] Hatherley criticises the "sinister, domineering quality" of the development, which he attributes to the communist influence at the time, claiming that "here you cannot forget for a moment that you're in a massive modern housing estate".

[28] In 1985, an exhibition entitled "Architecture, Urbanism and History" was mounted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, which focused on the work of Bofill and Leon Krier.

It features prominently in Brazil (1985) and in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (2015), where the characters attempt to flee as a substance similar to tar fills the bucket-like plaza.