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.

A Whimsical Water Tower in...Barcelona?

I spotted this fantastic water tower the other day while walking around Poble Nou, Barcelona's industrial graveyard. Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (authors of a major public sculpture in this city) could not have done a better job than this. I mean, you just gotta love that corrugation detail! Judging by the looks, it seems to be a relic from a defunct cardboard box manufacturer whose logo was the Star of David, no less.

Having grown up in Montreal, I was instantly reminded of that city's famous Guaranteed Pure Milk Company water tower. But then North American cities are places one would expect to find these kinds of quirky pop-constructions (the Orange Julius, a chain of roadside juice stands in the form an orange, is Montreal's answer to a Las Vegas duck). Barcelona, on the other hand, is not the first place that comes to mind when it comes to NON-pedigreed architectural whimsy, so it is very endearing indeed to stumble across something like this in my adopted hometown.

Go With the Flow

The World Waterpark at West Edmonton Mall is a vast steel and glass-vaulted tropical microclimate in the middle of that city’s suburbs; a Biosphere III for the age of leisure and consumption replete with beach, palm trees, wavepool and this waterslide complex. Like most of what one sees in malls and theme parks today, these slides are constructed of pre-manufactured, readily available off-the-shelf plastic components. The formidable complexity that is achieved here results not from any will to form, but simply from the intertwining of these standardized, repetitive components into a dense assemblage. The slides weave in and out of one another around a central service tower that supports a heroic plumbing system together with stairs and bridges, effectively comprising a Gordian knot on the scale of one of Piranesi’s carceri. From the gently curved novice run to the steep and straight double-diamond schuss, a tumble in one of these tubes is analogous to the now clichéd, early computer-animated scenes of helpless, lightning-fast voyages through something resembling a black hole in outer space or the intestinal tract of a monster.

The World Waterpark illustrates not only how, in this era of entertainment, form simply follows fun, but also how, urbanistically, the very idea of the theme park is premised precisely upon a dense environmental experience that is idealized and that is designed to compensate for sprawling, empty surroundings. It is interiorized excitement that matters here, not exterior expression. Accordingly, the architecture of the waterslides subscribes to a paradigm that is markedly different from that of the classical tectonic object. Here, any discussion of beauty dependent upon whether the addition or subtraction of an element might spoil its perfection is pre-empted: in a situation where density is everything, more and more is more. Nor do these slides subscribe to the notion of an ‘architecture of resistance’ that imposes austerity measures designed to induce reflection on one’s position in the world: on the contrary, the motto here is clearly “go with the flow.”

[originally published in The Canadian Architect, August 1999]