Preserving the past and crafting the future
Montpellier shows that heritage protection and modern urban planning don't have to be at odds
Last post, I talked a little about how Montpellier, France, is a mix of the ancient and the ultramodern. I have been staying in a 17th-century apartment in the old section of the city, known as the Écusson, which was a walled fortress dating back to the 13th century.
An écu is a French shield, roughly pentagonal, and it was the shape and nature of the old city’s protective walls that gave it the nickname. Today, the Écusson has gone from protecting Montpellier’s citizens to being protected by them, as the heritage of city has been preserved to an amazing degree, with hundreds of restoration projects completed over the years and many ongoing today.
From Place Royale de Peyrou, la rue Foch leads through l’Arc de Triomphe into the heart of the mediaeval city, which is a maze of winding streets and alleys in which I kept expecting to run into a minotaur. Instead, I found restaurants and shops of every description, sometimes the same ones over and over as I became convinced that a path of left-right-left-right would eventually lead me in a straight line but instead it folded space and either put me right back at carré un or had me arrive at the opposite end of the Écusson I was seeking. (Thank god for iMap.)
So if you are a huge fan of ancient art and architecture, as I am, you’ll love Montpellier. But if modern architecture and urban planning gets your heart pumping, as it does mine, you’ll love Montpellier even more!
Much as I love old cities, after a few days I had begun to wonder what was outside the Écusson walls. I had already been to the famed Place du Comédie numerous times (that’s where the tourism office is, after all) but I had halted my eastward exploration at the Polygone, a modern shopping centre that seemed to erect a wall of its own, at least in my mind, that said “nothing more to see here. Just another suburban mall.”
Looking more closely at a city map the next day, I noticed another large public square on the other side of the Polygone. It was called the Place de l’Europe and fronted on the Rivière Lez, one of Montpellier’s links to the Mediterranean Sea, about 12 km away as the flamingo flies.
When I went to explore it the next day, I was expecting to see an esplanade along the lines of Montréal’s Jeanne-Mance or Lafontaine park. Instead, as I exited via the Polygone shopping centre, which seemed the only direct path to Place de l’Europe, I was overwhelmed by my first sight of the massive, imposing and architecturally cohesive structures that greeted me. I felt like I had been transported to Rome at the height of the empire. This was much more than a public square or esplanade, it was a statement that announced Montpellier’s greatness, that clamoured for recognition in the pantheon of the world’s most important cities.
I have put together a 4-minute video (below) that allows you to share some of what I saw and allow you to make up your own mind about how it makes you feel, so I won’t add too much of my own impressions at this point. Instead, I’ll try to provide some context for the creation of Antigone, a neighbourhood built on a blank slate and promoted by then-mayor Georges Frêche and designed by Catalan architect Ricardo Bofill.
With the city rapidly growing in the 1970s and the centre of town protected as a heritage site, the options of where to house the growing number of residents and businesses were limited. Although locations along a river are highly prized in much of the world, there hadn’t been any significant development around the Lez because of frequent flooding and even severe storm surges from the Mediterranean into which the Lez flowed. The only major occupant was the army’s firing range. So the city arranged to purchase large tracts of the land in the early 1980s and consolidated 36 hectares for the construction of Frêche’s dream. I was happy to learn that Montpellier hadn’t followed the pattern of many cities, such as Montréal, whose modernization often came at the cost of the destruction of working-class and impoverished neighbourhoods. In fact, the socialist mayor had insisted on including low-income housing in the project, promoting a 50-50 mix that would be reflective of the city’s population rather than a new quartier for the nouveau riche.
According to Bofill, who died after contracting covid in January 2022, “The ideas that prevailed during the conception of this district have always belonged to the field of beauty, of harmony, of space. Subjected to the necessary pragmatism which a project on such a scale must observe, (…) these ideas were nevertheless been able to express an architecture where space rules.”
“This is virtually a new town,” says Archiweb. “It is almost one kilometer long. It includes about 4,000 new dwellings and 20,000 sq. meters of commercial space, much new office space, the Languedoc-Roussillon regional government headquarters, various city and other government offices, many restaurants and cafes, special housing for students and artists, schools, sports facilities, and underground parking.”
The project was controversial even as it was being built and my conversations with several Montpelliéraines about it revealed that it still stirs passions even today. Was it a success or a failure? Forty years after its initial construction, I’d have to say its longevity and continued vitality is testimony to its success, as is the path it opened along the Rivière Lez, whose waters are now, thanks in part to innovations introduced as part of the Antigone, a pathway to the Mediterranean for cyclists. The riverbank is also home to other innovative architectural projects to the south, such as the Arbre Blanc, which was named Building of the Year by ArchDaily in 2020.
And the city’s most recent neighbourhood, the Port-Marianne, has managed to walk a tightrope between the architectural cohesion of the Antigone while simultaneously encouraging the individual expression of a core group of contemporary architects around large open public spaces that, like Antigone, signal community and solidarity.
You’ll see examples of all that in my video, which I hope gives you a better idea of what I’m talking about. And I apologize for the speeded-up clips, but the trip down the esplanade would otherwise taken too much of your valuable time.
And that’s the end of today’s guided tour! Thanks for taking the ride with me and I hope to be back with you soon. Next stop: Sunday I take off for Strasbourg, just so I can remind myself of what Montréal feels like at the end of October. All the better to appreciate my return to beautiful Toulouse in November.
By the way, please check out this new and charming musical tribute to Toulouse, which is destined, I’m sure, to be even more popular than the Claude Nougaro classic, Toulouse. Un morceau de sicre, by Francis Cabrel.