Building Flaine, Marcel Breuer's ski resort
Here's a delight – a French promo film made in the late 1960s for a modernist ski resort designed by Marcel Breuer. Flaine: Porte du Désert Blanc, directed by Gérard Sire, is a film in French showing the construction of the resort, from the ski lifts to Breuer's brutalist complex, and then on to the skiing frenzy of its early days.
The resort is celebrated for its incredible hotel, whose sun terrace overhangs a cliff, and the works of art its founders displayed there, including sculptures by Picasso and Debuffet. But as modernism began to lose its glamorous allure, and the resort became poorly maintained, it lost its status as a leading ski resort, and by the nineties the buildings were falling into disuse and disrepair.
Some of that is coming back into use now, with refurbishment, an award from the French government and a renewed interest in Breuer's work, but it's still seen as a wildly over-optimistic scheme, and has yet to be rehabilitated by the wealthy skiiing set, for whom glamour now means features in OK! and scripted reality shows.
But do check out the updated main hotel
ReplyDeletehttp://totem.terminal-neige.com/fr/#!hotel-flaine/sejour-montagne
I've just returned from a week's skiing in Flaine, staying in one of these blocks. What I found wonderful was that there has been no in-fill building in different styles; they stand as they were built with space around them and (so far as I could see) no external alternations and with original details intact, such as the beautiful orb lights. It seemed like a complete and unspoilt implementation of a modernist plan. The lights are now mainly LED but there are a few sodium lights in the same style dotted around. And the ski area is great too!
ReplyDeletePlease "comment me" if you would like to see some photos and I'll send them on.