An expensive and long-awaited cultural centre and metro station created by French architects Patrick Berger and Jacques Anziutti on the site of a historic Paris marketplace has been officially unveiled.

The design at Les Halles is known as The Canopy due to its enormous umbrella-like glass roof, which comprises 18,000 pieces of glass supported by 7,000 tonnes of steel.

Construction on the €1bn (US$1.42bn, £806.7m) project, funded by the City of Paris, began six years ago following several architecture competitions to choose a design popular with both politicians and the public. Dutch studio OMA won the first such contest, but Berger’s design was later selected in its place.

The completed Canopy and the centre below replaces a deeply unpopular concrete shopping complex – nicknamed ‘the hole of Les Halles’ – which was built in the place of the market’s original 19th century glass and iron buildings designed by architect Victor Baltard. They were demolished in the 1970s in an act many critics have described as cultural vandalism.

The new centre features shops and high-end retailers, some of which are located underground, and these combine with leisure facilities such as a new library, a conservatory for the arts and a hip-hop centre, all underneath the 270,000sq ft (25,000sq m) roof – described by Berger as a “translucent envelope”.

Explaining the design, Berger said: “The shape, its spaces and its materialisation arise from a confrontation between the state of things and the emergence of new energy to Les Halles.

“The Canopy is designed as a substance. The ceramic glass material means that light diffuses in the day and it becomes a chandelier at night. It’s also a shelter at an urban scale against the weather, protecting a global space where one can travel at all times and in all seasons.

“The morphology of the architecture is the result of a balance between the building’s programmes within and its dynamic location.”