Remarkable
Var architecture #3

Alain
Capeillères'

swimming pool

Six-Fours-
les-Plages

1972–1974

February
11
March
18
2018

With the presentation of this little known masterpiece, the villa Noailles continues its series of exhibitions devoted to remarkable architecture in the Var department. At the beginning of the 1970s, the architect Alain Capeillères created a pool for his summer home, in Six-Fours-les-Plages. Overlooking the sea, he excavated part of the sloping site, freeing up an area which is protected from the wind and surrounded by retaining walls. Covered with more than 100 000 white ceramic tiles, this curved architectural setting houses a central pool which is 25 meters long.

This oversized, open-air building, appears like its own world, a white oasis inhabited by the shadows of the surrounding landscape. Alain Capeillères' monumental environment, hidden in the hollow of a hillside, became famous in 1976, as it was featured in a photograph by Martine Franck. Upon the pool's white, crisscrossed edges, are the weary silhouettes of bodies in the sun, a perfect summary of the utopian and futurist images which animated European architecture at that time.