DESIGN

In the South of France, a Utopian Town Inspired by Ancient Pyramids

New photos capture the essence of La Grande Motte, an otherworldly resort town in the South of France inspired by ancient pyramids.

Article by Alice Cavanagh

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The Fidji building, whose shape was informed by pre-Columbian temples in Mexico.The Fidji building, whose shape was informed by pre-Columbian temples in Mexico. Photography by Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental.

How do you build a town from scratch? For an answer, you might look to two metropolises that sprang up in just a handful of years during the 1950s and ’60s: Chandigarh, the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier’s planned city in northern India, and Brasília, the sprawling capital of Brazil, designed by the urban planner Lúcio Costa and the architect Oscar Niemeyer. 

Far less well known, but inspired by the same modernist belief in architecture’s utopian potential, is La Grande Motte, an otherworldly resort town of curving white concrete towers spread across nearly 810 hectares of former marshland in the South of France.

The magnum opus of the Turkish-born French architect Jean Balladur, La Grande Motte began in 1965 as one of several working-class resort towns built by the French government in response to the post-World War II vacation boom. (Later in the decade, a law increased workers’ annual holiday allowance from three to four weeks.) These places were fashioned as cheaper, family-friendly alternatives to the ritzier attractions of the Côte d’Azur, farther east. 

The entrance hall in the Delta complex.
The entrance hall in the Delta complex. Photography by Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental.

La Grande Motte (the Big Mound), a 40-minute drive east of Montpellier and named after a nearby sand dune, was to offer affordable accommodation for 37,800 tourists, in the form of holiday homes, rental apartments and campsites.

While Balladur, who died in 2002, realised this goal, his vision was met with scorn: in 1972, the magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui called La Grande Motte “architectural pollution”. Over the next 30 years, the resort expanded to include a shopping district, two schools, a church, a town hall and a golf course — earning it unflattering comparisons to Florida and Disneyland. But the town also became an ideological blueprint for future urban developments in France, an example of how a supposedly uninhabitable area — in this case, one that was windswept and mosquito-ridden — might become home to a mostly peaceful, self-contained community. 

Terraces on the Delta facade.
Terraces on the Delta facade. Photography by Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental.

In 2010, the French Ministry of Culture formally recognised La Grande Motte as a place of “Outstanding Contemporary Architecture”, making it the first town to receive that designation.

La Grande Motte’s futuristic, pyramid-shaped apartment blocks are arranged along a 6.5-kilometre-long stretch of sandy beach and around a man-made port, their position and shape designed to mitigate wind and salt spray, providing shelter for the immense gardens Balladur had planted below. 

The architect drew inspiration from the modernist aesthetic of the Bauhaus movement, the social-planning theories behind Brasília and Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse residential complex in Marseille and, more surprisingly, the symbolic forms of the pre-Columbian pyramids in Teotihuacan, Mexico. 

He hoped to make a place that would feel out of time: a lost paradise almost overrun by greenery. The result is what the French call dépaysant, the word conjuring the disorienting feeling of arriving somewhere unfamiliar.

Face-shaped details on the Palomino building.
Face-shaped details on the Palomino building. Photography by Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental.

That quality is what the photographers and friends Laurent Kronental, 37, and Charly Broyez, 40, set out to capture in the summer of 2020, when they began to document La Grande Motte with a large-format field camera. “It’s like discovering a parallel world in which we don’t know if we’ve found the remains of an ancient civilisation or entered the future,” says Kronental, whose work often focuses on cities and their inhabitants.

The duo went on to spend three more summers at the resort, exploring by bike and on foot. Often, they’d befriend residents who’d then grant them access to private spaces or views from their balconies. During the summer, the town’s population increases tenfold, to around 90,000 — including a mix of second-home owners and tourists who stay at the resort’s still moderately priced rentals and campsites — but the pair avoided frames that featured people, taking many of the photographs in what Kronental calls the “blue hours” of the day, the hazy moments just before dusk and dawn. 

The Temple du Soleil and Voiles Blanches residential buildings, photographed at dusk.
The Temple du Soleil and Voiles Blanches residential buildings, photographed at dusk. Photography by Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental.

The first part of the resulting series — titled “La Cité Oasis” and scheduled to be published in 2025 by Editions Sur la Crête — explores the territory as it might have looked before it was developed.

Its images feature the remote, ramshackle fishermen’s huts that still stand on the grass-lined estuaries of the surrounding Camargue region. 

In contrast, the second part of the book highlights the graphic gestures of Balladur’s masterpiece — the honeycomb-like facades and swooping silhouettes — set against the lush green of its landscaping. “You have the impression of going on a poetic journey,” says Kronental, “from being at the end of the world, almost marginalised outside of society, to this very modern oasis.”

Balladur was, Kronental argues, ahead of his time, in part because his fantasy of a town immersed in nature positioned him as something of an environmentalist. He dedicated more than two-thirds of the site to vegetation, planting tree species — including pines, planes, olives, poplars and cypresses — that could withstand heat, wind and sea spray. 

He also built 17 kilometres of footpaths that weave throughout the centre of the resort, restricting cars to the outskirts. 

Some 60 years later, La Grande Motte remains one of the greenest towns in France. 

“Balladur was visionary,” says Kronental. “He anticipated the city of tomorrow.” 

A hallway in the Port-Ponant apartment building. Photography by Charly Broyez and Laurent Kronental.
This is an extract from an article that appears in print in our twenty-sixth edition, Page 38 of T Australia with the headline: “A Grande Vision”

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Do You Need a Lazy Susan? Maybe Not. But They Make Meals a Lot More Fun.

Long overlooked as throwback novelties, spinning trays are making a comeback.

Article by Alexa Brazilian

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A collage of lazy susans.Clockwise from top left, rotating serving dishes from Concrete Cat, 1stDibs, Ayres, Hudson Grace, The Perfect Nothing Catalog, Sabine Marcelis, Vitra and Ladorada. Photograph courtesy of the brands.

The simple rotating serving tray has gone by many names over the years: dumbwaiter, butler’s assistant and, most famously, lazy Susan. Accounts of its origins are similarly varied: Some say it was invented by Thomas Edison; others credit Thomas Jefferson, claiming he named it for one of his daughters, who would complain of always being served last at meals (though he seemingly didn’t have a child called Susan). What’s more certain is that these dishes have been used since at least the 1700s, beloved as handy receptacles at dinner tables and organisers in kitchen pantries. And while they’ve come to be seen as retro in the past century — a relic of 1950s cocktail-and-canapé culture (toothpicked aspic cube, anyone?) — a new generation of makers are now revisiting them, producing elevated versions in unexpected materials.

“Lazy Susans are an aspect of the maximalist revival going on right now,” says Matt Heide, the 44-year-old co-founder of the Montreal-based design studio Concrete Cat. “And they definitely add a touch of ‘more’ to your table.” Indeed, there’s something theatrical about lazy Susans, especially the ones Heide and his wife, Shawna Heide, 44, make from high-performance concrete swirled with mineral pigments in pale pinks, blues and oxidized greens. Equally dramatic are the spinning trays by the designer Karim Molina of the Mexico City-based home goods line Ayres, which are hand-carved by artisans from chunks of volcanic rock sourced from nearby mountains. “The size of each piece is determined by the type of stone block we can find, which makes them all unique,” says Molina, 49, who likes to serve tacos, arepas and ceviche on hers. Below, a few suggestions for your own table.

a lazy susan
Photograph courtesy of Balarama Heller/Coming Soon.

Concrete Cat, $320, comingsoonnewyork.com.

a lazy susan
Photograph courtesy of Vitra.

Vitra, $90, ssense.com.

a lazy susan
Photograph courtesy of the artist and The Future Perfect.

The Perfect Nothing Catalog, $1,500, thefutureperfect.com.

a lazy susan
Photograph courtesy of 1st Dibs.

Sabine Marcelis, around $7,700, 1stdibs.com.

a lazy susan
Photograph courtesy of Ladorada.

Ladorada, $330, bergdorfgoodman.com.

a lazy susan
Photograph courtesy of 1st Dibs.

Vintage Art Deco, around $600, 1stdibs.com.

a lazy susan.
Photograph courtesy of Obakki.

Ayres, $555, obakki.com.

a lazy susan
Photograph courtesy of Hudson Grace.

Hudson Grace, $85, hudsongracesf.com.

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Holiday Ornaments That Are Out of the Ordinary

A roundup of unusual Christmas baubles, from diamonds made of lichen to glass flowers and strawberry tarts.

Article by Ella Riley-Adams

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21-TMAG-UNUSUAL-ORNAMENTS-1A roundup of unusual Christmas baubles, from diamonds made of lichen to glass flowers and strawberry tarts. Courtesy of the brands.

The Brooklyn-based floral designer Alex Crowder, 36, makes a point of limiting her materials to plants grown within 200 miles of New York City. To create arrangements for a lighting exhibition organised by the design firm Roman and Williams that opened this week in TriBeCa, she and her team at Field Studies Flora worked with SpadaFlora, a foraging company in New Jersey, to source “incredible twisty branches,” she says, while coppery spider chrysanthemums came from the Hudson Valley’s Treadlight Farm. On a 15-foot-tall Christmas tree spangled with red ribbon at Roman and Williams’s SoHo boutique, Crowder hung ornaments made from spiky datura seed pods and clusters of pine cones adorned with acorns. “We had an excess of them in the studio from other holiday projects,” says Crowder of the materials, “and we were trying to figure out, ‘How do we reuse these in a new, interesting way?’” She’s now selling the two designs through her website, along with a cocoon-like diamond of lichen, all strung from black velvet ribbons. Crowder’s aim, with the ornaments and her floral business as a whole, is to “draw people’s attention to materials that are often overlooked,” she says.

She’s not the only one turning to natural elements this year: the Los Angeles-based lifestyle brand Flamingo Estate has made a tradition of selling dried slices of citrus that can be hung from Christmas tree branches and emit a smoky fragrance. And for those who like the shine of a classic glass bauble, the British online home goods shop Abask offers glitter-dusted ones shaped like tropical blossoms. Below, a few more of our favourite holiday ornaments.

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Haley & Liesl Moon Disco Bub, $80, fredericksandmae.com. Courtesy of the brand.
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Choosing Keeping strawberry tartlet, about $44, choosingkeeping.com. Courtesy of the brand.
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Esme Saleh Pansy in Midnight ornament, $90, nickeykehoe.com. Courtesy of the brand.
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Akua Objects Gabriel Air Balloon, $50, akuaobjects.com. Courtesy of the brand.
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Flamingo Estate smoky citrus ornaments, $68 for a box of 30, flamingoestate.com. Courtesy of the brand.
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Abask handblown tropical flowers, $300 for a set of four, abask.com. Courtesy of the brand.
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Peter’s Seasons watercolour egg ornament, $19, thesixbells.com. Courtesy of the brand.

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A Spherical, Sepia-Tone Table Light Designed for Aesop

Everything to know about the illuminating collaboration between Aesop and Bocci.

Article by Megan O’Sullivan

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Aesop Bocci light pendantThe limited-edition 14p light, made with amber-coloured glass, is the result of a collaboration between the design studio Bocci and the beauty brand Aesop. Photograph by Fahim Kassam.

Growing up in Jerusalem and Vancouver, the artist and architect Omer Arbel spent much of his time building objects from wood and following a curiosity around construction. After graduating from the University of Waterloo’s school of architecture, he co-founded the design studio Bocci in 2005 after making a glass light fixture he named 14. “When I began that project, I had a very limited amount of time and budget,” Arbel says. “It was the constraints that ended up being the most powerful thing about the work.” His original idea for called for a perfectly spherical light, but he only had a half-sphere graphite mould, so he poured heated glass into the hemisphere and placed two together, leaving an eyebrow-shaped rivet between the sides. The 14 became Bocci’s first-ever product. “I built the whole practice around that experience, to encourage those moments of surprise, in which intention was a fluid thing,” says Arbel. Nearly 20 years later, the Vancouver-based Bocci is now partnering with Aesop to reimagine the 14 — this iteration is called the 14p — in a new sepia hue that riffs on Aesop’s signature amber glass bottles. While the original 14 light from Bocci was designed to be suspended from the ceiling, and a wall-mounted iteration came later, this version is made to sit on a table. It’s available for purchase at select Aesop stores, including the brand’s shops in Venice Beach, California, in Toronto’s Yorkville, and in Manhattan’s meatpacking district, where an installation of the lights is currently on view. Approximately $545, aesop.com/r/aesop-and-bocci.

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