Postmodern apartment

Le Belvédère Saint-Christophe is a 6-minute walk from the Cergy-Saint Christophe RER station (line A), accessible via a pedestrian walkway where you’ll find plenty of shops and a twice-weekly market.

Located on Cergy’s famous Place des Colonnes, the flat also benefits from access to the Axe Majeur promenade, which can be reached from the rear of the building.

Belvédère Saint-Christophe, the flagship project of the new town of Cergy-Pontoise, is located on the Puiseau plateau overlooking the Oise valley. The complex comprises a vast crescent-shaped building facing the valley and two square island buildings defining an amphitheatre-shaped public square, with a monumental sculpture by Dani Karavan at its centre. The buildings frame green spaces based on the garden city model. The overall composition, based on a geometric module with a square base, draws long horizontal lines inspired by English Georgian architecture.

The building is part of the post-modern movement, which runs counter to the modernist desire for formal innovation based on the neglect of tradition, and reintroduces classical composition and ornament, in a relationship with history that oscillates between homage and pastiche. The interior façade takes the form of a grandiose colonnade reminiscent of a Doric peristyle, alternating columns and monumental skylights topped by a frieze of square bays and triglyphs, in a theatrical reference to Greek architecture of the Archaic period (7th century BC). The exterior façade features a surrounding wall punctuated by square towers. Inside the building, each dwelling has an efficient spatial layout and a dual orientation that optimises sunlight, natural ventilation of the rooms and a diversity of views over the horizon.

From the 1960s onwards, the concept of new towns developed in France as a way of relieving congestion in saturated metropolises, by proposing independent, nearby towns with their own infrastructure. The aim of this new approach was to move away from the much-criticised housing estates of the time, while at the same time offering a solution to the problem of inadequate housing. In 1965, the Schéma directeur d’aménagement et d’urbanisme de la région de Paris (master plan for development and urban planning in the Paris region) established the development of these new urban projects.

The new town of Cergy-Pontoise began to develop around the river Oise in 1970, with the inauguration of the Préfecture building designed by Henry Bernard, who also built the Maison de la Radio (1963). Initially, factories moved in and the first cinemas and shops opened. In 1972, the new districts saw the arrival of their first residents.

Cergy-Pontoise is also marked by a work of landscape art, the Axe Majeur, recently classified as a “heritage of regional interest”. This monumental work of art, created by Dani Karavan between 1980 and 2010, offers a route punctuated by different stations, starting with the Belvedere Tower in the centre of the Place des Colonnes, and descending to the Oise via the Gérard-Philipe Amphitheatre and the impressive Passerelle, an emblematic red metal structure.

“Modern architecture died in Saint Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972, at 3:32 p.m.”

With the dynamiting of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in Missouri, inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, architectural theorist Charles Jencks pronounced the end of modern architecture in favor of postmodern architecture. This architectural movement, which first appeared in the United States in the 1960s, is an evolving concept advocating the rejection of an overly rationalist, unitary architecture. With this in mind, Ricardo Bofill founded the Taller de Arquitectura in 1963, becoming the leader of postmodern production in Spain and France.

In the 1960s, Bofill’s early projects were characterized by the use of brick facades, notably in the Nicaragua apartment building project (1965), and polychromatic materials, such as the Gaudí District (1968). It wasn’t until the 1970s that his architecture really took on a neo-classicalist bent.

His 1975 project for the Halles district features a Baroque plan and French-style gardens, with buildings featuring colossal columns. Ricardo Bofill designed several projects in the Paris region: Les Arcades du Lac-Le Viaduc (1982), Les Espaces d’Abraxas (1983), Les Échelles du Baroque (1986), Les Colonnes de Saint-Christophe (1986).These projects feature a number of references to ancient classical architecture, such as arcades, temple pediments, triglyphs and pilasters, firmly anchoring his architecture in neoclassical postmodernism…