Description

The urban space of La Grande Motte springs from a philosophical observation of human nature.
Jean Balladur[1]

 

The Democratization of Vacations

Just as the quality of housing for the lower to middle social classes is the driving force behind the residential buildings presented in this book, La Grande Motte addresses another domain previously reserved for the wealthy classes, namely vacation travel, which from the 1950s onwards became something also enjoyed by the middle and working classes. Vacations became a commodity for everyone, offering free time for relaxation, contact with nature, physical recreation, and new impressions. In Spain and Italy, the response to this new demand was unbridled, with a reckless development of nature and beaches. France, however, in its Trente Glorieuses[2] period, developed a concept for the appropriate urban and architectural response to the democratization of vacations. In an unprecedented large-scale project, the state first acquired land in the marshy and mosquito-infested coastal section of the Languedoc-Roussillon region, and made it arable. Five new port cities were built on the formerly undeveloped land. George Candilis, a pioneering architect in social housing of the time, played a key role in the overall concept of these new resorts for the greatest number. The planning group developed a Doctrine pour la Ville de Loisir du Plus Grand Nombre [3] (Doctrine for the Vacation Town for the Greatest Number).

An egalitarian terraced city

The representative project of the initiative was the port city of La Grande Motte, planned from 1963 onwards by Jean Balladur. As a young man, Balladur moved in the same circles as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and worked for Sartre’s magazine Les Temps Modernes (The Modern Times) during his studies. In this highly important public forum for French left-wing intellectuals, Balladur later published repeatedly on architectural topics. His article Urbanisme et démocratie[4] (Urbanism and Democracy) appeared in the January 1956 issue.

La Grande Motte is based on a new conception of the city, one that is egalitarian, green, and focused on people rather than cars. The latter in particular is noteworthy given the time of its creation. In keeping with the idea of a democratic, classless society, there were no grand hotels, luxury resorts, or exclusive areas on the sea front.[5] Accommodation consisted mainly of small apartments in apartment blocks.

The apartment complexes are equal in terms of their location and their respective advantages. While the first planning for La Grande Motte still featured conventional blocks, a second planning phase from 1963 developed all residential buildings as stepped terrace developments to create an entirely stepped terrace city, where all apartments have terraces and loggias.

An autonomous city

This was indeed a vacation settlement, but from the onset it was laid out like a permanently inhabited city. Jean Balladur planned all the relevant facilities: school, town hall, church, synagogue, sports facilities, cultural venues, exhibition hall, congress hall, swimming pool, health center, restaurants and cafés, cinemas, market square, main square, and cemetery. Resolutely not conceived as a satellite of nearby city Montpellier, La Grande Motte thus also presented an alternative to the dormitory towns of the banlieus, or suburbs. Consequently, La Grande Motte was elevated to a separate municipality in 1974. The facilities of a holiday resort and those of a “normal” town complement each other. One benefits the other as the substantial infrastructure would not have been created specifically for seasonal guests, nor would it have been created for a few thousand inhabitants.

The plan was to cater to 4,000–6,000 permanent residents and about 60,000 vacationers per year. The number of permanent inhabitants should be, according to the example of the historical bathing resorts St. Tropez or Deauville, approximately ten percent of the number of annual vacation guests. Today, 9,000 people live year-round in La Grande Motte and the city attracts two million vacationers per year.

Architecture and landscape planning are equally important

Balladur saw the dominance of moving and parked vehicular traffic as a major cause of failed urban development. Contrary to what has been usual in seaside resorts, in La Grande Motte vehicular traffic is kept completely away from the coast, where there is no road. The main vehicular traffic is concentrated on separate roads outside the city center. On the remaining streets, pedestrians have luxuriously wide sidewalks, with carefully selected ground surfaces, seating, and shady trees. There are no, or only slight differences in level between the street and the promenades. The boulevards are interspersed with small green areas. La Grande Motte also has a network of unpaved pedestrian paths beneath the trees, parallel to the streets.

Balladur saw architectural and landscape planning as being equally important at La Grande Motte. Pierre Pillet was the congenial landscape designer. Seventy percent of La Grande Motte is green, making it one of the greenest and most pedestrian and bicycle-friendly cities in Europe.

The first two stepped terrace buildings, Le Grand Pavois and La Provence, completed in 1968 according to Balladur’s plans, created the typological model: pyramids on an almost square floor plan with stepped terraces on two sides. This was a bold reference to the (foursided) stepped terrace temples in Teotihuacán. In preparation for the project of his lifetime, La Grande Motte, Balladur had made a trip to Brazil in 1962 and also visited the temple complexes in Mexico.[6] Though Balladur’s concept was functionally and chronologically closer to his fellow countryman Henri Sauvage’s pioneering plans and buildings for stepped terrace workers’ housing, to which Balladur also explicitly refers. Sauvage’s concept of “hygienic living with light, air, and sun for all” in stepped terrace housing was realized in La Grande Motte, albeit in the context of a vacation town. A total of sixty architects worked on La Grande Motte, following Balladur’s clear stipulations on the inclination angle of the terraced pyramids to the number of apartments, everything was specified. Most of the buildings followed the prototype of the first two pyramids planned by Balladur, with stepped terraces on two sides. But some pyramids were terraced on all sides, like the Les Incas complex by Lucien Guerra, built in 1975 with 240 apartments. The layout of the buildings within the urban concept is particularly interesting and applicable to mixed-use (residential) districts as well. The roughly ten-story stepped terrace buildings are connected by lower horizontal “bridges” to form complexes with, for example, 200 apartments. This creates dense urban structures that are staggered like landscapes. The complexes are accessible to the public through carefully designed, green courtyard-like open spaces. The ground floor areas are often open and designed as arcade zones for shops and restaurants. The apartments are small and simple, some are just studios with an integrated kitchen.

In the La Grande Motte du Couchant district, which was begun in the 1970s, the crystalline pyramids are transformed into softly curved stepped terrace complexes that extend like wings into the dune landscape. The compact, low-rise settlements of La Grande Motte can also serve as a prototype for general residential housing.

From “concrete monster” to national cultural heritage

In the 1980s, the media and critics reacted extremely negatively to the ex nihilo city. After forty years, however, its image has changed completely. As Balladur and Pillet’s concept envisaged, nature is now doing its part and also contributes to this change in perception. The trees have grown and the greenspaces have evolved. The qualities of the unusual architecture are now also being recognized; indeed, have reached cult status. In 2010, France declared La Grande Motte to be a “twentieth century national heritage site.”

In 2018, on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the arrival of the first holiday guests, many consistently enthusiastic reports about La Grande Motte appeared throughout Europe. “Sun decks for all” read one apt headline in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.[7] While die Welt wrote, “Half a century after its foundation, the ‘Cité des Pyramides’ looks neither old nor worn out.”[8] A Swedish design magazine asked architects for articles on inspiring vacation destinations: NL Architects chose La Grande Motte.[9]

Today La Grande Motte is a lively, functioning city, accepted by its short-term and permanent residents (although housing prices there no longer correlate with the original idea of “vacations for all”). In its uniformity as a completely terraced residential town, in its rejection of the dominance of traffic, and in the equal status of its landscape and architecture, La Grande Motte remains unique to this day.

Of the complexes presented in this book, La Grande Motte is, on the one hand, an exception as a vacation town, and on the other hand, it is archetypical and by far the most comprehensive and largest example of a green terraced town — an ideal city. La Motte is also one of the earliest realizations of a terraced housing scheme.

The fact that La Grande Motte caters to the countless numbers of vacationing people makes it significant among social terraced housing. Regarding the summer lifestyle in London’s Brunswick Centre, resident Stuart Tappin said: “It’s like being in the south of France.”[10] The question of what people need in order to feel comfortable, relaxed, and in contact with nature, with themselves and with others, i.e. ideally in a vacation-like state, lies at the very root of the stepped terrace housing concept. The aim is for residents to spend more of their leisure time in their immediate living environment, thus reducing leisure mobility, conserving resources, and strengthening social contacts.

Footnotes

---

Originally published in: Gerhard Steixner, Maria Welzig (eds.), Luxury for All. Milestones in European Stepped Terrace Housing, Birkhäuser, 2020. Translated by Anna Roos, abridged and edited for Building Types Online.