The Kalandeberg Fountain

In a small square, Kalandeberg, in the old city centre of Ghent, Flanders, there is this fountain that I make a bee-line to whenever I get to visit that city. Surrounded by boutiques in what I presume are mostly death-masked buildings, faced by the outdoor seating of a Pain Quotidien, pressed to one side of the oblong lozenge that is the open space in which it sits, unassumingly silhouetted against the glow of a MaxMara outlet behind it, the fountain is surrounded by cracked concrete bollards, is grimy, quite small, and is obviously tilting and subsiding to one side since the water from its basin uniformly falls down into its lower catchment at one edge. Even the sound of its splashing is normally -during the day- lost under the romping screech of an accordian playing old neapolitan tunes for the benefit of passing shoppers.

Please go here for the full video as blogger cuts its width in half on this blog.

However for me it commands the square, and, along with George Minne's (unfortunately temporarily removed) fountain of the kneeling youths,

George Minne's Fountain of The Kneeling Youths

marks the two poles of that sophisticated assurance which saturates Ghent in its own unique atmosphere of apparently frozen composure; a composure not of elegant display, rather the opposite, of a very spare and restrained matter-of-factness, in which everything from its infrastructure to its history, its architecture and aesthetics has been somehow pragmatised, somehow ironed free of all contradiction and doubt before they have been implemented and installed (or renovated).

Everything is so confidently neat, and yet nothing feels forced, nothing artificial. It is a calibrated smoothness that seems to be balanced by, on the one hand, little un-problematic flourishes of sentimental exuberance and sensual delight, from the city's chocolates to the vivid ceramics on its town houses, and on the other hand, at the opposite end of the spectrum, by studied transgressions, by the precise and pointful constructs of the city's large art school, and the contents of its institutional art museums, which evocatively contravene and disturb the smooth trajectory of the rest of the city centre, perhaps therapeuticaly providing an outer edge for the bored to indulge themselves and their speculations in. Whilst Minne's fountain, with its idealised, sexualised, emaciated dream of suspended youth sits right at the heart of the city as its prime example of the second pole of Ghent's aesthetics, asking questions, demanding attention, and always deeply moving, the Kalandeberg fountain, resting in its little out-of-the-way square, is the period totem-pole icon of the city's little whimsical decorations, its tasty indulgences.

Never perfectly proportioned, the whole fountain is oddly balanced. But oddly balanced in an endearing way, like a house that has been designed to look cosey by resembling an old tumble-down farmouse, or to look like a building that has grown in an inexplicable, but happily picturesque fashion over time. It is a warm living room from the turn of the 19th Century compressed and piled up into an ornament for the city.

The column is too small, it is squat and inelegant; the basin and its feet are far too large and rise up too high; the urn is too high and spouts its water feebly, from four tiny spouts which can do nothing to stop the water being carried away by the wind. But the manner by which the elements have been joined together, by simple stacking, give them the unity of a still life, of a small collection, of a side table packed with objects placed on lace, and the materials with which they have been made, pink stone, alabaster, copper and sandstone, make them all look edible, delicious to look at as well as sweet.

And the sculpture on which the column rests is just as sacharine, with an adorable dog caught in a perpetual chase around the circumference of the fountain after a fowl, a goose, and a duck. It is a sculpture of a kind with the sort of watercolours that would hang in any number of living rooms depicting hunting scenes, views of forests, a day out in country pastures; and the ornaments on the urn, column, basin and base are also of the sort that would decorate any number of Edwardian objects in any amount of living rooms, with their heavy, unmistakeable forms and clear, direct symbolism.

It is not an object for contemplation, and can hardly be called a relevant object for the city today, and yet, like Proust's Madeleine, it seems to be a little portal into tastes that encompassed a style and way of living whose residues, like the remnants of Horta in Brussels, have mostly been flattened out in the current city, while their current equivalents -the median household's patch-up of ikea and retro bric-a-brac- lack a comparable physical representative.

Architectural Conversations, Allusions and Polychromy in Place De La Concorde

Place de la Concorde, the largest square in Paris is framed on all its sides by national landmarks: on one the Hotel Crillon, a luxury hotel once favoured by Marie Antoinette, swimming in white and honey coloured marbles and gilding, was, the few times I walked past it, appropriately adorned by its automotive equivalent, a walrus-like white and gold Rolls Royce; the other sides respectively accomodating the National Assembly (previously the Palais Bourbon), the beginning of the Champs Elysees, and the Tuileries Gardens.


The decorative scheme of this vast Place, designed by the architect Jacques Ignace Hittorf, and including two large fountains and a marching border of Rostral Columns, resembles more the carefuly considered and decorous elegance of a Parisian dining table than a European Square. Balancing exotic motifs and a rich, uniform colouring of sea-green highlighted with gilding, the fountains and columns manage to maintain all the allusions to ancient Rome of the high Empire style, but without any of its drum-beating pomp and bellicose, self satisfied profusion of clashing forms and colours.


Place de la Concorde has all the grandeur of a witty feminine display that at once seduces and beguiles you with its harmoniously resolved conceits, delivered with an easy and languorous tone, while slipping through an underlying message of strength and resolute confidence. There is a conversation going on between the Crillon, Assembly, Tuileries and Champs Elysees, and it is happening over the Place, whose arrangement of emerald items adorn, frame and conduct their discussion as a dinner service both generates an atmosphere and helps choreograph the sequential unfolding of an evening's events.


Hittorf was a great proponent of Polychromy in Architecture, fighting his ground against the "purists" in the Beaux-Arts after discovering that ancient Greek Temples had been heavily coloured. This led to the deep green ground of the Concorde, and the intended richness of colour in St Vincent de Paul, which, unfortunately, was not completed to his saturated designs.

St Vincent de Paul

Although, partly inspired by Hittorf's discoveries and all the dazzling and mysterious aesthetic splendour of the ancient world they implied, just around the corner you can visit the Atelier of Gustave Moreau, where there is more than enough painterly recreations of strange, bejewelled, encrusted and coloured worlds both to make you want to re-read Flaubert's Salammbo and Herodias, and to make up for Hittorf's unfinished masterpiece.

Detail of Salome by Gustave Moreau

Even today most discussions in architecture about colour have to be formed as apologias, as if such an indulgence were something that must be defended. In the nineteenth century, after Hittorf's discoveries, at least architects had the ever-expansive precedent of the classical world to cite as justification, with evidence ever increasingly proving the predominance of pigment in the ancient meditteranean, confounded by the ongoing excavations in Pompeii and the unearthing of its interiors that were as red as pottery and as warm as flesh. Joseph Rykwert, in his article the Polychromy of Greek Temples in edition 2 of Terazzo, even goes so far as to say that the Greeks never even considered leaving white surfaces bare (naked in their eyes), only leaving yellowish stones like Tufa or Poros without treatment, and if marble, covering it with stucco -the colour of sunlight, or at the very least staining it in a Saffron emulsion. Today however there are no such precedents to cite, and the seductive allure of pigmentation seems forever either stuck in the supporting, diagrammatic role of spatial and structural differentiation, or else as a guilty, irrational pleasure, that because of its powerful and direct appeal to the senses, can be used, but in a tightly controlled and restrained fashion, lest it swamp the practical and cerebral core of Building.

capital from stadium entrance in Olympia, by Ernst Curtius and Friedrich Adler 1896

Speaking of ancient allusion and precedent, the columnar lamposts in the Concorde, although refined and delicate, refer to an ancient tradition both imperial and antagonistic. Under all the civility of Hittorf's design, there is both the earthiness inherent in the depths of his greens, and the base swagger of the unapologeticaly triumphant: the lamposts are a rare (at the time) reinstatement of an ancient Roman tradition/motif, the nautical equivalent of their Triumphal Arches through which a returning army would pass in celebration of a conquest with its spoils, both human and financial.


Ancient ships used to have huge brass rams at their fronts, which were their main form of attack. They would speed as fast as possible into their enemy, ploughing into its side and hoping to break the other vessel in two. Following an important naval victory against the Etruscans (the first recorded) in 338BC, at Anzio, the Romans severed the Rams from the surviving Etruscan ships and attached them to walls in the Comitium, a gathering place in the Forum, to declare the vanquishing of the enemy fleet.

Reconstruction of the Rams in the Comitio

In 260BC, following a defeat of the Carthaginian fleet, the Romans erected a column in the Comitio onto which the captured Rams (also known as Rostra) were attached, creating a stand-alone monument, and a new form of column, embodying naval might and prowess, now known as a Rostral Column.

The position of a Rostrum on an ancient ship, and on a Rostral Column

After the battle of Actium, in which the Romans devastated Antony and Cleopatra's fleet, the Rostral Column was moved to a large Altar which developed into a platform from where speakers would address crowds at the Forum (hence the word Rostrum now also meaning a place from where public speakers address a crowd), sealing its position at the heart first of the Republic, and later of the Empire, meaning its form and symbolic meaning have survived to this day via classical interventions in our cities created by architects like Hittorf, and commemorating events as varied as the Battle of Lepanto, and the desire of Louis-Phillipe to imply some kind of imperial glory during his relatively morbund reign (during which the square in its current form was commsioned).

And to conclude on an entirely whimsical note that returns to the dining table, I finaly managed to purchase in Paris this figure of Paris offering his golden Apple to Aphrodite, an act inspired by voluptuosness and passion, but pregnant with the saga of an epic war and which here, in this little piece of porcelain, was compressed by the taste of the eighteenth century into a charming ornament for the desert service, whose purpose was to please the eye, and to direct conversation in case there happened to be a dearth of topics.

Geneva's Time and Timelessness

Departures Hall

The old terminal of the city’s airport is an essay in well proportioned, precisely detailed, slick high modernism, of the sort that in any other country would either be so hidden by a grimy cake of ill considered additions, and a total lack of cosmetic maintenance, that its original virtues would be entirely submerged; or else would have been lovingly rediscovered, restored, and elevated to a higher plane of architectural existence by the status of historical idol-hood that is conferred on a building together with the ‘heritage’ budget for its restoration.

Facade of Main Terminal Building

Elsewhere the building would have been through several cycles, through which it would have suffered and been reborn, or at least seen itself be modified and altered repeatedly to accommodate evolving circumstances, the place would have been marked by time, but this building seems totally frozen at the moment of its inception, perfectly maintained on the cusp of the 1970s, unchanged except for a few television screens for displaying arrival times, that look as if they are from the 80s. It doesn’t have the totally contemporary bright-shiny-modernity of the renovated Royal Festival Hall (that impossibly idealised past newness, like aggressive plastic surgery), but is instead a slightly faded form in whose lack of lustre, but abundance of intact atmosphere, can be read a consideration and awareness of aging and decay that is far more consistent, perhaps frighteningly so (like embalming at birth) and far less sentimental than our fitful, and guilty, reconstructions of buildings raped by inconsideration. In this rigorously petrified architecture, which seems to deny time, there are endless parades of posters and advertisements for luxury watches, from the whole gamut of manufacturers in the area (you can see two in the right of the first photo) from Audemars Piguet to Baume et Mercier and Rolex.

Advertisment for a luxury watch in Geneva Airport

These adverts seem to cluster into three groups, those that draw lines of reassurance from the past into our present, and by implication into a comfortably recognisable future; those that assure timeless worth through the scarcity value of the materials from which they are constructed; and those that thrust with the confidence and bravura of jet-engines, or fast cars, into a positively exciting future. The designs follow suit, with the first type all looking like bizarrely overcomplicated Victorian scientific devices (usually with a hint to the nautical) that I would have thought only Hollywood, or Tim Burton, could conceive of; the second type forming themselves as miniature display cases designed to show off their burden of diamonds or even, as above, their weight of genuine moon dust; and the third uniformly composed of two ingredients -although at varying quantities, these being the angular implication of movement and speed taken from the silhouette of a stealth fighter, and the massive punch and carved strength taken from the jutting profile of a tank.

With all of these posters, and in the building itself, there is a distinct lack of the kind of novelty and newness which was so prevalent in the Heathrow that I had just left. Even the posters of futuristic looking watches looked terribly obvious, old somehow, completely without any forms that might surprise, even in the slightest way. They are all about circumventing time, whether by being sure of the future through your connection with the past, through the assurance of a ‘timeless’ quantitative value, or through the confidence of a masculine arrogance; and all perfectly framed within a building that seems to be a fulfilment of all their promises, a fossilized but living nexus, unchanged in all its main elements, cared for and maintained as if it were intrinsically valuable, and still looking to a bright future from back at the apogee of the modern traveller’s glamorous past.

Office building on the lake front

It was by parts thrilling and sad, I felt as if I were Donald Draper in MadMen visiting the city back in the day, bronze door handles, dapper suits and all, and the illusion only gets stronger if you are visiting as briefly as I did, and only have time for a momentary walk around the city, because its waterfront is clad in exquisitely maintained modern palaces from the same period, perfect boxes of Gordon Bunshaft slickness arrayed around the lake and the river as if they were counting down the days to their inception. Those buildings were thrilling, I could imagine the whole place like a little Florence of the 60s, but then accompanying these buildings wasn’t any art, decoration, invention or even glamour, just adverts and products like the kind below. Lots of little timelessnesses that can be melted down, and would either still hold their value, or be worth even more.

Carlo Scarpalike

Some pictures of a couple of buildings by an architect in Provence, which we saw in Aix and Avignon, and who clearly wanted a bit of "Scarpa" in his works.

School in Avignon, unknown architect

The school above, which is in the old centre of Avignon, is difficult to find anything but painful,

Banco Popolare Di Verona, Carlo Scarpa

however the apartment building below in Aix, is quite an odd pleasure.

Apartment building in Aix-en-Provence, unknown architect

Walking around, and getting quite lost in the winding alleys of Aix, it was fun to have this building, bedecked with its little scarpa-esque ornaments, like cheap, but colourful costume jewelry thrown onto the most average of bodices, popping up every half an hour or so. It grounded that part of the town for us with the intimation of a sweet story about a young, provincial architect, visiting italy on a study holiday, and having been deeply moved by the Banca Popolare building, the Querini Stampalia, and the Olivetti Showroom, and considering it his personal mission to bring a little something of that magic back to provence.

There was another building around the corner, much more recent, more restrained, and with a rather enlarged budget. It was in effect a handsomely proportioned French Town House, built in stone, but with hugely over articulated window frames, that geometrically followed through into the cornice lines, rendered in the typical stairlike, staggered, Scarpa profile. It was however definitevely less endearing for being so well finished, and so elegantly proportioned.

Seriality, Suspense and Holiness at the Abbeys of Senanque and Silvacane

These two abbeys are the companions in style, order, and period of the previously posted Thoronet Abbey. I said in the post on Thoronet that at some point in the future I would like to go back there "in order to get a better understanding of its appeal", a commitment that held absolutely no pleasure for me, and felt more like a necessary obligation stemming from the lack of emotion stirred in me by that great monument of southern france, lauded by so many architects, and whose lack of instinctive appeal to my sensibility left me feeling rather left out. I could appreciate the intimacy between the organisation of the abbey, and the highly structured routine of the cistercian monks, and how its layout, its design, and even the stonemasonry were to some extent ways in which the order's philosophy was brought into life and material; but the walls were all so bare, the proportions of the stone blocks in relation to the bays and the vaults seemed neither disordered enough, nor composed enough to be either charming or inspired, the light was too abundant to be mysterious, and was somehow flattened into infinite degrees by the dearth of any event, decoration, modulation or flourish on any of its inner surfaces. At best the place left me slightly lost as to my lack of 'wonder', and at worst irritated me as much as if I had been given a plate of diced carrots at a well known restaurant, and been told to "close my eyes and appreciate them one by one". However there were two moments to which I was drawn, the staircase that had been jammed into the corner of a "perfectly" barrel-vaulted hall, and the strange little hexagonal pyramid which sat in the garden of the cloisters, and which was grafted on to their southern end, containing the be-tentacled fountain that served as the monk's washroom (you can see this in the youtube video). In another abbey, I may not have clung quite so much two these two moments, which are lovely, but not remarkable in themselves; but in amongst the interminable grey volumes of evenly divided stone that uniformly unify Thoronet, they shined like gems by virtue of contrast. It seemed that the more acreage of orderly simplicity was bestowed on my eyes by the abbey, the more precious any rupture in that smoothness would seem; and since there was so much uniformity and smoothness, and very few exceptions, like the principle that increases the fetishistic power of a body part in relation to how little else is shown, all architectural pleasure was condensed into those two moments of rupture, heightening their potential to give pleasure far out of proportion with any objective interest they may have embodied.
That specific enjoyment, which for me was the main delight of the abbey (and formed in my memory a sort of 3dimensional, spatialised version of the filmic technique of accumulated suspense), was one I only managed to pinpoint after having visited Senanque and Silvacane abbeys which I enjoyed in much the same way.


Silvacane Abbey

Senanque Abbey

Senanque Abbey
Their seriality was remarkable, with the organisation of the three being almost identical; and just as small exceptions were emphasised by the marching rigour prevalent around them within each abbey, so the slight differences between the three abbeys were made terribly exciting by their otherwise total correspondence. The site and context of each of them was the most obvious difference, and changed the way they were approached, but even within the abbeys we found ourselves pouring over the plans on the tourist leaflets, trying to figure out what was different, however tiny. The most notable change of all was at Senanque abbey, where the chapel had been oriented differently (see below), meaning that on the approach, rather than the usual picturesque cluster, one saw a facade that differed completely from the other two, dark and monolithic as a medieval fortification, and punched full of variously sized windows.

Senanque Abbey

They were both as spartan as Thoronet and each other, however the tone of their austerity was slightly different, with Silvacane (cloisters pictured below) being everywhere nibbled at the edges, slightly worn down, and always gentler than the other two in the note of tenuousness added by all its missing columns, chipped entablatures and cracked voussoirs;

Silvacane Abbey Cloisters

whereas Senanque, with its darker stone (nave pictured below), was more militant than spiritual in its impression, less thoughtful than it was brooding, uncompromising rather than considered.

Senanque Abbey, nave vault, window, and vault at the crossing.

Aside from the differences in plan, and the subtle shifts in atmosphere, they nonetheless developed throughout the journey around each of them, the same amplifying of certain architectural moments of exception. Like the glimpsing of an ankle in a room full of burqa-clad women, these moments act like lightning rods for desire, standing in relief against the ground prepared for them by the rest of the space.

Silvacane Abbey, west window

Whether a window (above), or the remains of some niches and a tomb (below), they attract attention. Through their rupturing of the almost impenetrable perfection of the volumes around them, through rupturing them with incommensurate gestures -while nonetheless being composed of the same material, and fashioned in the same manner- they act to amerliorate any sense of confinement within the architecture. As well as being objects of almost sexual attraction, they act like pressure releases, folds in an unendurable smoothness that hold the prospect of unexpected occurences, unexpected plays of light in the form of the material, unexpected activities in the divine prison that was the life of a monk.

Silvacane Abbey, niches beside altar

Silvacane Abbey, remnants of a tomb, and a fresco

The most extreme such example were the squinches (which manage the transition from the square crossing to the octagonal dome) in Senanque. At first one almost doesn't notice them, the eye only registering them as hemispheres of shadow, probably because they are in the same dark stone, and formed of the same simple geometries, as the rest of the space. But on approaching the crossing, they rise out of the perfectly dressed blocks of stone around them, strangely unfolding from the pier below them like bizarre architectural compositions depicting men holding rainbows, figurative flourishes that, like the octagonal lavabo in Thoronet and the window in Silvacane, seem as if they should have had no place in their respective programs, and yet all hold pivotal roles, with the geometricised rainbows here being given the divine task of forever holding up the dome of heaven. It seems plausible that for these monks of poverty, order, and exactness, an entire spatial order was only truly harmonious, could only truly maintain a sense of the divine, if its hermetic unity was precisely perforated with points of inconsistency which, like the inexplicable presence of holiness at points in a hard or monotonous life, offer the comfort of an escape, the promise of something richer beyond.

Senanque Abbey, Squinches at the crossing

Senanque Abbey, squinch at crossing

Sexualised stone, and harbingers of divine escape, the abbeys of Thoronet, Silvacane and Senanque are succinct examples of the redistribution of desire and imagination that is brought about when an architecture is at once loaded with meaning and intent, whilst being simultaneously stripped of as much corresponding elaboration as is possible.

Senanque abbey, columns and capitals in the cloister

Latitude 43

Sitting above Saint Tropez like a quietly disapproving wall of imperiously white rectitude, Latitude 43 looks like some kind of hospital for patients who have been mortally overwhelmed by the excesses in the city below.

the video above is cut to half its width by blogger, please go here for the full version

The 30degree kink in its body, together with the stacking up of floors towards a pinnacle at the rear surmounted by an industrially positioned chimney of some kind, make the building look as if it is not only some kind of sanatorium, but a boat as well, stuck on land, but forever trying to sail away, packed full of its neurotic patients, towards some past mechanical future where it can finally berth itself.

However the people that I spoke to in Saint Tropez about it didnt seem to read its aloofness, separation and horizontality in the same way, they rather preferred to see the building as a part of their own contemporary mythology of fame. The inference was made that because the building is white, and from the 1930s, and this is Saint Tropez, it must be by the most famous architect of all time, Le Corbusier; and indeed, for many this building is simply another affirmation of the place's singularity, not silently trying to sail away into the Provencal landscape, but in fact proudly moored in the ground, loudly exclaiming its presence as brashly as the biggest super-yacht in the harbour.

Either way, as you approach it (after having crossed the no entry, private property signs), it reveals a more delicate side. The kink is sensitively used underneath as a threshold between the public road and the shared entrance gardens and pavilion, on the facade as a way to soften the repetitiveness of the layered horizontals, and on the roof as a way of mediating between the two main volumes of the building.


All major terminal edges are either beveled, rounded, or punched through with slightly comical round windows, adding a whimsical and light hearted flavour, in that they seem to be attempting to achieve something like the elegant distortion of the rectangular forms attained by the kink, but instead only embellish and busy them like children sitting in on a serious conversation, interjecting occasionally with delightful but irrelevant remarks.

The small house just next to the main building being like the extension of this tendency at a larger scale.

Monochrome Gordes and its Voluptuous Church

Scenographicaly perched atop the crest of a hill, Gordes is your perfect little Provencal stop, packed full of shops selling cute handmade nick-nacks, and plump with Estate Agents advertising villas in the region. Respectfuly impressed and well behaved tourists mill around its streets, and sit on its steps making use of the free wi-fi network.


The buildings and streets are all made of the same, yellowish stone, and for the first fifteen minutes it is easy to admire the way in which the strong light in this part of the world carves-up the architectural forms, breaking them into sharp and abstract shapes. But after fifteen minutes the light grows too strong, and whatever visual pleasure there is to be gained from contemplating fortuitously assembled, sunbathing stone houses, is somewhat undermined and emtptied by their containment of a branch of 'Knight Frank', or of 'Christie's Property'. The juxtaposition carries with it a comparison of the village's sobre and monochrome aesthetic, with the aesthetic of tasteful, or rather neutral, decorum so uniformly held up as correct by those who sell property for a living in the United Kingdom. The pretty village of Gordes becomes an embodiment of the kind of restrained moderation that helps differentiate those who have taste from those who dont, the kind of uber snobbery in which one is more showy, and more snobby, precisely by showing less -but showing less in just the right way. The shadow-carved forms start to feel as oppressive as do all the endless and unstoppable waves of pristinely finished white-on-white english apartment interiors. Almost exactly the same streets in other villages, that looked almost exactly the same, did not have the same effect, but in Gordes it was overwhelming. Overwhelming at least until I stepped into the main church, from which I expected nothing but another dark, romanesque interior sliced out of perfectly cut stone.


The facade was as yellow, and uniform, as any other of the buildings, but stepping inside was a vertiginous thrill. The oppressive feeling of the situation outside, where I had felt the drab weight of convention pressing in on me from each alley-way, was positively turned inside out and set off like so many fire-works. It was as if the church committee had given the job of decorating the place to an over-enthusiastic member of the congregation, who had proceeded to go wild in her inspiration, drawing material from a combination of architectural pattern books, and the array of patterned plastic table-cloths she happened to have at home. It was an adorable, fun, and ultimately rich interior which, to my pleasure (and totally contradicting the sentiment I had had outside about the people visiting the village) was very much enjoyed by the several English admirers whose conversations I happened to eavesdrop into whilst inside.

niches sport the remains of liberaly applied volcano-red, and themselves cut into huge expanses of orthogonaly arranged cobalt-blue clover-leafs on an aqua-marine ground, all moulding away ever so gracefuly.

And plasterwork ornament, alot of it oddly formed somewhere between baroque and rococo, but always slightly strange, and all painted and powdered like a little girl who has been overly zealous in the application of her mother's make-up. Foundation, concealer, and blusher, to soften and shape the curves, and highlighter and mascara to pull it all together, sharpen the edges and bring out the colours, all liberally, and exuberantly applied.

Toyo Ito does the Cote D'Azur

Having hopped onto a boat in order to overcome the slight headache of a hangover, as well as the nauseating memory of having been caught with Karl Lagerfeld in a small nightclub, together with his entourage (and the unpleasant zone of high pressure created around him by the desperate weight of people trying to take pictures with their camera phones, and perhaps, just maybe, say something to him), I spotted something across the bay. In my inability to quite properly tell if it was what I thought it might be, or whether perhaps it was just a doppleganger by virture of distance -a normal building impersonating a famous one- the situation seemed entirely suited to the area, this funny place where you constantly think people are famous, because they all dress to look as if they are, as if they are moving images from OK magazine, and somehow it is difficult to distinguish, as in the end everything and everybody is suffused with a warm glow of aloofness and celebrity. But occasionaly there are summits, points of notoriety that are known outside of the area, and which, like Karl Lagerfeld and (apparently) Leonardo Di Caprio, serve to keep the aura strong enough amongst the rest of the look-alikes, to keep them consistently levitated above the ground in the popular imagination (a sort of vote-of-confidence). Even if at first glance they may be mistaken for any other of the imposters, even often looking less the part than them for the lack of being as flashy or manicured, they rapidly stand apart as people begin to notice and smell the "authenticity", like when Chirac walked down the Port in his Hawaian shirt looking rather ugly and shabby, but as he walked, and people began to notice, rapidly attracted enough of a crowd that the traffic was stopped. It is these peaks of true notoriety that fuel the imaginative speculation which both brings people to St Tropez to see the famous, and which brings the wealthy to be seen, both groups being satisfied in that the people who come to see assume that everyone they are seeing must be "someone", and those who come to be seen, even if "nobody" are flattered by the deflected attention.

I was pleased to see as the boat drew closer that this was indeed a moment in which this principle had been transferred into the architectural realm. I was correct, and it wasn’t an imposter, or a fake, and as the low white box became a collection of dark and light triangles, it became clear that Toyo Ito’s Serpentine Pavilion had been brought to the Cote D’Azur for a touch of formal celebrity, a little moment of contemporary architectural glamour in the sun. Only there were no crowds taking pictures on their IPhones and body-guards keeping people at bay, just me with my camera.

Port of St Tropez as Inverted Amphitheatre

In winter the Old Port of St Tropez is like most other seaside towns on the Cote D'azure, with cafes facing the small boats moored in the docking area in front of the harbourside buildings.

However with the advent of warm weather, and the arrival of the town's pyrotechnically wealthy summer residents, comes a transformation of the somewhat non-descript strip of road along the water. Similar changes must also occur in other superyachting venues, but the contrast between the sleepy, and admittedly rather drab banality of the area in its winter months, with the thronged spectatorship, and correspondingly ramped-up showmanship and display of its summer months is uniquely extreme.

The huddled quayside buildings fronting the port are outshone, dwarfed, and hidden in darkness as all possible space fronting them is filled with extremely large yachts that are all designed either in an aggressively spectacular mode of shining white and dazzling silver modern, or in an outsized nostalgic mode bedecked with subtle curves and wood finishes; either way, both types are uniformly arrested in flashy illumination -uplit, backlit, toplit, lit-from-under-the-water- which, in combination with the open terraced design of the backs of these boats, insures that their occupants may be seen, theatrically framed and enlarged, from the port, turning the whole strip of the town into an inside-out amphitheatre, a vienna opera house of dancing millionaires, and billionaires eating nouvelle cuisine next to models, turned in on istelf, so that all the boxes are facing outwards, piled on top of each other like so many exquisitely crafted stages of theatricalised excess and privilege.






The cafes facing this inverted arena of stacked stages, having lost their view beyond the boats afforded by their winter absence, become incomparably more popular thereby, becoming hosts to packed audiences, who can both sip, and sup, while speculating on the origins and identities of the yacht-bound class, gyrating and guzzling and lapping up the attention from both the seated cafe spectators, and the incredibly numerous throngs pressing along the dock-front in order to peer into the realm above, beyond, but in clear sight, amongst the franticaly glittering lights, on the sparkling decks in front.

La Thoronet Abbey (L'abbaye du Thoronet)

A short film, made of photos taken with my Canon 30D, showing some of the moments that struck me during an unfortunately short visit to this wonderful Abbey (one of the three Cistercian sister abbeys from the 12th and early thirteenth centuries in Provence). The spaces that can be seen in order are the southern aisle and the approach to the aisle's corresponding apsidal chapel, a small room situated a half level above the dormitory, the terrace area above the cloisters, the lean-to barrell vault of the northern aisle in the chapel, the nave, the Chapter-House, a nave-pier, the fountain positioned in the cloister courtyard, and whose roof can be seen as an hexagonal pyramid in the footage from the terrace, and final two exterior views, one from the south, and another of the exterior of the apse. The place had a strong influence on Le Corbusier, culminating in the realisation of the sublime La Tourette monestary designed by him for the Domincan Order. I will be going back at some point in the not too distant future to spend a day there, and hopefully an evening, in order to get a better understanding of its appeal.

The embedded video above is cut in half, to see it full size, go to the youtube page here

This is a photo of the corner of the dormitory -a long rectangular hall with a barrel-vaulted ceiling- in which a staircase was added at some point to access both the attic above, and an intermediate level in the adjacent structure, creating a rather dynamic, turning compression of penetrated solids pressed between the vault, floor and walls...


Plan:

Norman Shaw House 1

Marcus Stone House, Kensington, by Richard Norman Shaw, 1875