La Grande Motte Revisited

I first saw La Grande Motte in the summer of 1978, more than a decade before I would graduate from architecture school. Back then, the town left an impression on me for its large pyramid-shaped concrete buildings, and for the fact that the beaches had scores of young women who went topless; a bit of an eye-opener for a 14 year-old male just landed from North America. 

In retrospect, I must have been very distracted by the peaches on the beaches, because more recently, upon revisiting La Grande Motte (this time accompanied by a female architect-friend), the place looked completely different to me, even though, at its core, it has changed little during that period. Clearly, what seduced me this time around was the architecture.

I mean, here we have an example of a late 20th-century new town with public spaces that are civic, dignified and human life-affirming and whose buildings are designed to contribute to an overall harmony; to something greater than the mere sum of the parts. La Grande Motte is living proof that it is possible to design a humanly-scaled, walkable, cyclable, and architecturally sophisticated new town without resorting to, say, the pre-industrial nostalgia of so-called New Urbanism. (Perhaps I'm being nostalgic too, but at least it's nostalgia for a period I have lived through.)

A small civic square on one side...

...on the other side, a courtyard garden

Architect Jean Balladur master-planned La Grande Motte in the mid-1960s as a place where the Northern European middle-class, which at that time was beginning to frequent Spanish destinations like Torremolinos or Benidorm en masse, could vacation closer to home, and in an architecturally more sophisticated setting. Emphasis was clearly placed on creating an overall sense of harmony akin to that of traditional vernacular architecture, but with modern materials and expression. 

La Grande Motte does not banish commerce, signage, sun shades, or Hello Kitty beach towels hung to dry over a balcony handrail. This is no Communist vacation camp. Rather, these kinds of elements of "individuality" are subtly veiled behind differently patterned perforated concrete screen-façades, which vary playfully but also consistently from building to building. 

Ah, yes, that age-old conundrum of finding a balance between overall urban identity and individual architectural identity. Interestingly, no building is privileged over any other at La Grande Motte. There are no singular "landmark" buildings by famous architects whose task is to somehow compensate for a sea of surrounding mediocrity. A similar lack of hierarchy occurs in the urban plan: No rows of sea-fronting buildings blocking second-rate buildings in-behind. 

Since 2010, La Grande Motte has been officially recognized as French 20th-century patrimôine. But it deserves to be celebrated outside of France too, because I doubt many other examples of new-town urbanism from the last half-century are this successful still to this day.

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Garden and Gaffe: A Hotel by Jean Nouvel

“The city is like some large house and the house in turn like some small city”

-Leon Battista Alberti



If there is one type of "house" that comes closest to Alberti’s “small city”, then surely it is the hotel. Like a city, a hotel is comprised of both private “residential” space (in this case temporary residences) and relatively public functions; the private realm making up the representative bulk and consisting of largely repetitive units while the more public lobby, conference spaces, restaurant, and so on are monumental, singular spaces of representation. The ultimate mixed-use building type, a hotel is a place where guests stay for a variety of reasons, be it a travelling sales rep hoping to strike a business deal, illicit lovers having an affair, criminals evading the police, academics at a conference, or spies on an intelligence-gathering mission. Anything can and everything has happened in hotels: Watergate, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Bed-ins for Peace, DSK.



It is no surprise, then, that the hotel has become in recent times one of the most architecturally reinvigorated types of buildings. The drab, beige hotel of the nineteen seventies and eighties, where sameness, familiarity and the offer of a cozy “home away from home” was the ideal, is seemingly a thing of the past. Hotels have instead become places where people seek a memorable experience that is precisely different from the familiarity and routine humdrum of home. As an “experience” space available to anyone (who can afford it), the hotel can also be seen as a democratization of the pleasure palaces of the aristocracy of previous centuries.



The Renaissance Barcelona Fira Hotel by Jean Novel and Ribas & Ribas is, like many palaces, characterized principally by a garden, that most sensuous space of pleasure and temptation since biblical times. This garden, however, climbs up a 26 story high atrium space that is completely open to the exterior on one of the sides of the tower, which forms a “U” shaped floor plan in which the rooms are accessed by garden-facing galleries that are open during three seasons of the year, and that are separated from the garden in winter by means of transparent roll-down barriers.



A single staircase climbs up the atrium along a different trajectory at each change of level, connecting galleries as well as bridges, platforms, and a hundred or so planter boxes containing ten different varieties of palm trees and other plant species. It is a delirious, seemingly endless space that would make Piranesi proud and which redefines the late-modern hotel atrium made famous by architect-developer John Portman.



It is the exterior openness of this atrium that sets it apart from
John Portman’s, however. In this atrium, there is no
wall-to-wall carpeting, no chrome, and no air conditioning. Instead,
there is a gentle breeze and the sounds and framed view of a city beyond.
The leaves of the palm trees move in the breeze, and the hotel rooms
open directly onto an exterior garden and not into a long, dim,
anonymous corridor, making it tempting for guests to leave the door open when in their rooms.



Unfortunately,
however, the theme of “palm tree” has been taken by its architect a
little too far. The palm tree-shaped windows of most of the
rooms are gimmicky and goofy. A gaffe. Those windows are precisely why
it’s a good thing the doors of the hotel rooms open
directly onto the memorable garden--and city--outside.

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A Tour of the Monuments of Sant Adrià del Besòs and Badalona in the Province of Barcelona

Realized in an illustration workshop conducted by Miguel Gallardo and Karin du Croo of Club Talleres.

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Pool Typology

We've all seen that famous aerial photograph of an American Southwest suburb in which each and every house has a swimming pool set in a lush, green, perfectly trimmed back lawn. This is the Spanish Northeast version: more compact, and with "clean line" Narco-minimalist (as opposed to Spanish Colonial) styling. A pool for each and every terrace. Happy World Water Day.

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