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La Grande-Motte, France - Mar 2013
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Chris Hellier / Rex Features (2317956ac)
France's Pyramid City
The coastal resort of La Grand-Motte in southern France is one of the most unusual yet successful new towns built along the French littoral in the nineteen sixties and seventies.
Although widely derided at the time for its extensive use of concrete - in a hitherto wild expanse of marshes and sand dunes - and for its distinct modern architecture, it has stood the test of time.
It continues to draws hundreds of thousands of tourists a year and has even been listed by the French government as a twentieth-century heritage site.
La Grande-Motte is the epitomy of sixties idealism. Its sun-drenched streets wear their history and peddled dreams in the names of their concrete apartment blocks.
Like something out of a kitsch American movie set in suburbia, 'Sunny Land' apartments rub shoulders with 'Happy Land' and 'Dixie Land'.
Other condominiums are named in reference to the sea or classical mythology - 'Les Dunes', 'Les Belles Plages' (Beautiful Beaches), 'Poseidon' or 'Ulysses'.
And who wouldn't want to buy or rent an apartment in the 'La Residence du Soleil', 'Le Paradis du Soleil' or 'Le Temple du Soleil' (The Sun Temple)?
Aside from its evocative names, however, La Grande-Motte, is best characterised by its pyramid-shaped architecture.
Pyramids became the overriding form chosen by chief architect and town planner Jean Balladur, who had been inspired by the pyramids or ziggurat-shaped structures of the pre-Colombian sites of Teotihuacan in Mexico.
The town's most iconic building is the huge 'Great Pyramid', built in 1973, which rises nineteen stories above the port.
It combines the form of a pyramid with the mirrored shapes of the Pic Saint-Loup, the nearest mountain peak which dominates the adjacent coastal plain.
The towering building was also intended to func...
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Sailing regatta - Les voiles de St Tropez, France - Oct 2006
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Ingrid Abery / Rex Features ( 940080v )
Wooden masts of classic yacht moored in the old port, St Tropez, France.
Sailing regatta - Les voiles de St Tropez, France - Oct 2006
(FOTO:DUKAS/REX)
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Sailing regatta - Les voiles de St Tropez, France - Oct 2006
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Ingrid Abery / Rex Features ( 940080q )
Two sloops crossing tacks as they race upwind towards the windward mark off Pampelonne beach, St Tropez, France.
Sailing regatta - Les voiles de St Tropez, France - Oct 2006
(FOTO:DUKAS/REX)
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Sailing regatta - Les voiles de St Tropez, France - Oct 2006
Mandatory Credit: Photo by Ingrid Abery / Rex Features ( 940080p )
Gaff-rigged cutter coming off the start line, St.Tropez, France.
Sailing regatta - Les voiles de St Tropez, France - Oct 2006
(FOTO:DUKAS/REX)
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