Baker

Now known as “Villa X,” the Villa Bloc at Cap d’Antibes on the Côte d’Azur was designed by Claude Parent for the sculptor André Bloc and finished in 1962. This photograph, taken when the author stayed there in 2018, captures the sense of optimistic modernism underlying the design, including the fabulous top floor, Baker’s “big glass box looking out over the Mediterranean”—reminiscent of Bronaryre’s Manhattan sky-cell, and echoing the light/enlightenment-seeking theme of FLOREAT LUX.

Also shown is the external staircase—helical rather than spiral, as in the Templar staircase of the Unburying the Dead scene. Watson & Crick revealed the helical nature of DNA in 1953, just a few years before Villa Bloc was conceived, and so perhaps the helical design in this case was not a coincidental foretelling but a conscious acknowledgment of that epoch-changing event.

Although privately owned and not open to the public (even the road to it is restricted, apparently due to French naval control of the neighboring lighthouse) the history & details of the villa’s design are available in the abundantly illustrated book La Villa Bloc de Claude Parent (Editions Imbernon, Marseilles, June 2011). In the original design the middle floor was open, spatio-dynamisme having strict rules for the proportion of open to enclosed space, but a later owner had it filled in. In La Villa Bloc de Claude Parent, the architect’s views on this can be seen in his angry scrawl across the blueprints: “Idiot et voyou [thug].”