LA CITE OASIS
For 4 years, Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental photographed the town of La Grande Motte in the south of France. The two photographers set out to highlight the town's spectacular and singular architectural heritage, as well as the wild and traditional territory in which it was born, at the gateway to the Camargue. A major work by architect Jean Balladur, this garden city, built between 1960 and 1970 on the sands and marshes of the Mediterranean coast, has become one of Europe's greenest resorts, and a source of inspiration for the towns of tomorrow.
There are places you feel you know without having ever seen them. And such is La Grande Motte, a place that may look either familiar or quaint, but whose powerfully evocative moniker will alone conjure up a fairy-tale vision of a land emerging from the unchartered territories of our psyche loaded with memories, images, sounds, colors, history.
Sixty years after the ambitious territorial development project was completed Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental have captured the images of what could have been just a mirage. They approached a mysterious sleeping beauty that every summer wakes up with a vengeance and they caught it at dawn.
La Grande Motte was conceived and constructed back in the days of the Glorious Thirties when France was thriving through an unprecedented economic boom while paid leave was fueling mass tourism.
The French authorities were worried the Spanish beaches attracted too many vacationers and embarked on the creation of sea resorts to keep them home.
The notion of creating a city from scratch was nothing new at the time as the triumph of modernity was spearheaded by visionary architects. Niemeyer had built up Brasilia on dry lands, Le Corbusier had erected the city of Chandigarh at the foot of the Himalayas and so would Jean Balladur raise La Grande Motte out of the Camargue marshes.
The DATAR-managed project was part of a broader mission tellingly entitled “Racine” (Root) with a view to founding a city on the sands but also to enthusing life in it. Vacationers would drop anchor in this summer paradise and float there on dreams of perfect bliss.
Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental have walked up memory lane and found traces of undeleted past. There remain the marshes with the fishing-huts, the horses, and the mosquitoes. Under the guise of an avant-garde city, they have also found a hope for a contemporary future.
A seaside resort and port in one, La Grande Motte is also a garden city, a resplendent seaside resort that has been dubbed “the new Florida of the 1970s”.
Its luxuriant vegetation, naive shapes, pure colors, and altogether harmony are as many attempts at returning to a mythic origin halfway between the Mediterranean and pre-Columbian America.
The architecture, where water and concrete merge into a single flow, suggests the serene fusion of the being and the world. To endow the new-born city with a history, Jean Balladur planted the roots of a new city in this virgin land. It is now fertile ground to muse on the permanence of dreams and the utopia of human greatness.
While creating its cosmos, the god-like architect had also acted as a prophet of a new religion. Here, all roads lead to Man. These modern and primitive humans are heirs to the Inca cult of the Sun. They have left their flying saucer on the terrace, and swing between Yin and Yang while flowers doze in the shade of a Moai. They pray in futuristic chapels where portholes have replaced stained glass. This is a world of mirages.
It may look like a building but it is an egg that some turtle left on the beach to hatch. Further along, a crenellated bar of balconies winds its way while in the West, endless backs wave. Like abandoned toys, pyramids, balls, empty or full circles seem to be waiting for giant children to awaken them. This protruding wall is the mouth of a fish that gapes at finding itself out of water in the bluest sky. However, the walls themselves have eyes, ears, mouths such as the one licking a pine tree like a cone and ice cream ball. With its entwined branches, a tree embraces a trellis wall to the point of suffocation. And the church has dropped its cross to stretch to the sky the curve of infinty.
The architecture, where water and concrete merge into a single flow, suggests the serene fusion of the being and the world. To endow the new-born city with a history, Jean Balladur planted the roots of a new conquest in this virgin land. It is now fertile ground to muse on the permanence of dreams and the utopia of human greatness.
Beyond the aesthetic research This series is an invitation to viewing La Grande Motte as a space of life and crystallization of sensations. An apt symbol of a dreamy soul, it will make the vacationer, resident, or spectator feel that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
