Antigone District

Expanding over 36 hectares of land, Antigone district has been one of the largest single developments completed by RBTA in France. It dates back to 1979, when the newly-elected municipal council of Montpellier decided to undertake urban development programmes and make a new district on a site near the city centre. The purpose of this town-planning operation was to develop a new district along a central axis which would provide for the city’s balanced eastward expansion and link the historical centre to the river Lez.

We consider Antigone within RBTA as an exemplary project in so far as we were able, as architects, to design a piece of city. The buildings conceived by RBTA, as well as the design of all outer spaces, and the buildings that were the result of a common work between the chief architect, Ricardo Bofill, and the various executing architects, are an integrating part of the same city and emphasize its unity.

Antigone’s composition is based on the harmonic principles of the Golden Number, a design system applied to both the layout of streets and squares, as well as to the façades and construction details.

RBTA designed the master plan and most of the buildings in Antigone quarter, from the design of the plazas to the details of the facades, urban furniture and landscape elements.

The program includes:  La Place du Nombre d’Or (288 apartments and shops), Les Echelles de la Ville (retail and offices), Les Rives du Lez (landscape design of Lez riverbed), the Headquarters of the Regional Government of Languedoc-Roussillon, Le Port Juvénal (350 apartments) , the Hotel Mercure (four-star hotel), Le Parnasse (100 apartments), Le Capitole (apartments and shops); La Tour Europe (offices); Les Guinguettes (2 restaurants) and the Olympic Swimming Pool of Montpellier.

The housing project consist of half of subsidize housing and half of private sector housing that share the same typology: a row of doubly oriented residences of varying depths (between 9 and 12 meters) and heights (4 to 7 storey).

Antigone was meant to be a new urban centre with all that this implies for the urban activity that develops within its limits. With all the features of a typical Mediterranean city, the project expresses the dignity and importance of Montpellier’s cultural past.

The scheme extends and repeats the morphological typologies already present in the city; east-west axis through the physical centre of the site which centralizes, organizes, symbolizes and gives an orientation to the new urban development.

Because the site and the tissue in which it had to be integrated had no shape, it was essential to find for Antigone a clear morphological scheme, one that will be readable, understandable and recognizable to its future inhabitants as well as to the general population of Montpellier. This is why we introduced the axis;  as the backbone to the development, it displays a sequence of open civic spaces differing on both their atmosphere and their contents. RBTA worked on a basic geometry which engenders the succession of spaces along the axis, and at the same time, the district’s urban fabric which develops along each side.

The ideas that prevailed during the conception of this district have always belonged to the field of beauty, of harmony, of space. Subjected to the necessary pragmatism which a project on such a scale must observe, on the level of the construction costs, the profitability of the various operations and the various technical factors, these ideas were nevertheless been able to express an architecture where space rules.