Palais Bulles

French star designer Pierre Cardin was looking to buy a nice house on the Cote d’Azur, but was horrified by all the unoriginal designs that he had seen and that didn’t match his avant-garde fashion designs . While searching, he stumbled across a construction site being built by architect Antti Lovag for a French industrialist. When the owner died before the home’s completion, Cardin asked the architect to complete it for him. Cardin was thrilled to acquire the almost finished residence that finally satisfied his exigent taste. A heart attack inspired Lovag to reflect on life, and his new outlook of course influenced his architecture. "I discovered that I was mortal— meaning I discovered that I was free. I realized that building as if for eternity is an attack on time itself. Furthermore, it usually leads to an angular, aggressive organization of space. On the other hand, when one knows one's limits, all that is swept away. I began to think about improvised buildings, cobbled together on-site and adapted to a particular person's desires or idea of a house," he explains. "Instead of construction based on prefabricated panels, I began experimenting with frameworks that could be bent and changed and with techniques of concrete surfacing. That way, forms could move again." Architecture's first task, he came to believe, was to eliminate inhuman angularity. Cardin, too, adores curves. "The circle is my symbol," he says. "The sphere represents the creation of the world and the mother's womb. Holes, cones, breasts—I've always used them in my designs."