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 Grand Motte, an otherworldly resort town of curving white concrete towers spread across nearly 2,000 acres 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. 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 vacation homes, rental apartments and campsites.
While Balladur, who died in 2002, realized 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. In 2010, the French Ministry of Culture formally recognized La Grande Motte as a place of “Outstanding Contemporary Architecture,” making it the first town to receive that designation.
La Grand Motte’s futuristic, pyramid-shaped apartment blocks are arranged along a 4-mile-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.
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 civilization, 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 first part of the resulting series — titled “La Cité Oasis” and scheduled to be published next year by Editions Sur la Crête — explores the territory as it might have looked before it was developed: 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 marginalized 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 made him something of an environmentalist. He dedicated over 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 11 miles of footpaths that weave throughout the center of the resort, restricting cars to the outskirts. Some 60 years later, La Grand Motte remains one of the greenest towns in France. “Balladur was visionary,” says Kronental. “He anticipated the city of tomorrow.”