Super-Cannes - Space-Age Bachelor Pads on the French Riviera
Following on from our article on the Vasarely Foundation, Luciano Panella heads down the Riviera towards Cannes. Famed for its film festival, it is also home to some of the most unusual and modern villas in France.
An extraterrestrial looking house made of huge concrete bubbles, sits on the Esterel hills by the the French Riviera. It is the Palais de Bulles, the Palace of Bubbles, the summer villa of Pierre Cardin.
Pierre Cardin has always been very sensitive to futuristic atmospheres and even his summer house reveals his passion for the future. The Palais de Bulles stretches in Port-la-Galère, near Cannes and it was built in the early '70s after the project of the hungarian architect Antti Lovag.
Lovag noticed that traditional habitations, like the cavern or the igloo, were round and reflected the way a human being moves in space. These houses were built "around" the human being and did not force him into rectangular spaces, like modern houses. Spheres and round surfaces reminded of the maternal uterus and avoiding any sharp edge they could prevent, according to Lovag's theory, neurosis and violence.
Lovag, together with Hausermann and Chanéac, experimented in the '60s a new idea of architecture based on natural forms and in the early '70s Lovag realized his first round house, always in the South of France, for the French businessman Pierre Bernard. In 1975 Lovag began the Palais de Bulles and Pierre Cardin bought it in 1989 for 50 millions of French Francs.
The Palais de Bulles is hidden among the vegetation, and the exterior colour is brown, to make it similar to the nearby Esterel hills.
The interior is made of many round rooms, resembling foam bubbles, all furnished and decorated in a perfect '70s style, no pictures on the walls, but big design lamps, coloured cushions and everywhere a deep, fluffy, wall-to-wall carpeting. Windows are big portholes with a round glass on them. The villa has also a conference room, a private cinema, a swimming pool and a tennis court.
Cardin's house is not an exception on the French Riviera. It is not unusual to see private villas built by famous architects with "modern" conceptions.
Closer to modernist attitudes of style is the Maeght Foundation at St. Paul de Vence. Marguerite and Aimé Maeght were rich Parisian gallerists who designed and decorated their beautiful villa at St. Paul de Vence with the works of some of the most important artists of the last century: Mirò, Chagall, Giacometti, Arp, Calder, Braque, Léger and had an unforgettable opening in 1964, a party where no less than Yves Montand and Ella Fitzgerald were called to entertain their fashionable guests!
The most famous example of private architecture on the French Riviera is perhaps the house of the Marquis de Noailles in Hyères, used by Man Ray for the setting of his surrealistic film "Le mystère du chateau des dés".
This villa was projected in the '20s but it is so simple and balanced that doesn't show its age at all. The proof that, like an advertisement says, style never goes out of fashion.
[Published 4 December 2001]
Other articles on Uppers you might enjoy
A psychedelic trip into architecture: the Vasarely Foundation
If you are in Provence, don't miss the Vasarely Foundation at Aix-en-Provence. Luciano Panella reports.
A Palm Springs Diary
Uppers very own answer to Julius Shulman, Scott Duncan, took his camera on a trip out to Palm Springs - find out what developed.
Villa Spies - Staffan Berglund and Mikael Askergren (E&R Forlag)
From the outside it looks like a UFO, from the inside like a set from U.F.O - Uppers investigates Villa Spies.
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| david evangelisti | dec 6 2001 1:29AM |
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