Antigone

Esplanade de l'Europe, Antigone district of Montpellier. Photo by Thierry Bezecourt, August 2005. Image published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license

Antigone is a district of Montpellier which was imaginatively redeveloped during the seventies. It is located to the south-east of Montpellier's historic centre on the "polygone", the rifle range of the former military barracks known as the caserne Joffre.

The development is an interesting example of urban planning since all the buildings have been constructed in a neo-classical style with huge pediments, entablatures and pilasters and are symmetrically arranged along a single visual axis, nine hundred metres in length, on the right bank of the River Lez.

The same architect who designed the Antigone, Ricardo Bofill, also designed the headquarters of the Languedoc-Roussillon region which continues the visual axis along the  left bank of the Lez.

Hotel de Region, Montpellier, by Ricardo Bofill. Photo by Thierry Bezecourt, August 2005. Image published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license

The development, which primarily provides low-income housing, also incorporates an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a huge multi-media library named after the French novelist, Emile Zola, and a large shopping centre.

The much-maligned "Triangle", a slanting tower block, also forms part of the polygone complex.

The Antigone development, championed as the Champs d'Elysees of  Montpellier, was made possible by flood prevention measures which shored up the Lez so that the city could expand along its banks towards the coast.

The Triangle, Montpellier. Image published under the GNU Free Documentation License, verison 1.2 or later

 

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