Every year in April, Royan Architecture Month celebrates 'The Most 1950s City in France'. For the 2024 festival, some 2,000 visitors are expected to visit Royan's rich modernist heritage during the event's 12th edition. The programme will focus on the city’s preserved, post-war, modernist architecture monuments, including the Notre Dame church and the Palais des Congrès, as well as current restoration projects in the midcentury realm, such as its clam-shaped central market, the Jules Ferry school, and the creation of the Municipal Technical Centre.
Royan Architecture Month
A key addition to this year’s festival is the offering of guided tours of the Palais des Congrès, which unveiled its makeover in June 2023. The restoration took three years, 25 regional companies, and was led by Claude Ferret, the son of the original architect and father of modernist Royan, Pierre Ferret. Its playful, perforated façade remains intact with Jean Prouvé-designed panels in Vermeer grey and yellow.
Marché central dome taken in 2016
Another focal point is a series of organised visits to the Royan market, led by its restoration architects, Benoît Meriac and Carole Le Maréchal of Nadau Architecture. 'The Royan market is a shell, its shopping life and its local products are its pearl,' says Royan’s heritage foundation on a website that has raised €92,000 of the €100,000 goal to restore what they also call the nerve centre of their walkable city. Inspired by Oscar Niemeyer's architecture, the market was built in 1956.
Palais des Congrès
Participants in the events include Caroline Mazel and Gilles Ragot, both Bordeaux-based architecture teachers, and Richard Klein, the president of the modernist preservation non-profit Docomomo. Lectures touch upon topics such as the Australian architect and 2002 Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Murcutt; how Royan’s architecture differs from greater France; and how the city offers a unique variation of Le Corbusier’s architecture definition, 'the learned, correct, and magnificent play of volumes assembled in light'.
'We are working with the mayor and banding with other mid-sized European coastal cities with modernist collections to raise awareness and protect our buildings,' said Royan deputy mayor Nadine David, who oversees cultural heritage.
Villa La Perriniere
Such preservation efforts and focused attention also work towards healing a collective wound: bombs destroyed 85 per cent of Royan in the Second World War. Tasked with the reconstruction, Bordeaux-based architect Claude Ferret led the charge to turn the city into a seaside resort with white concrete, curved structures, and a primary colour palette.
Villa la Marroniere
Oscar Niemeyer’s Pampulha resort particularly inspired him. Ferret’s work marked the start of Royan’s renaissance as a modernist coastal gem. Almost 75 years later, cue the city’s second comeback.
Front de mer patrimoine 15
-
Beloved British screenwriter Dennis Potter inspires an exhibition with a difference at Studio VoltaireHilary Lloyd's multi-faceted exhibition at Studio Voltaire considers Dennis Potter's life and work, from much-loved TV classics to power inequalities
-
Insert here: London Design Festival gets intimate with insertable designAt London Design Festival, Heirloom Studio showcases 36 objects – some life-saving, some pleasure-giving, all made to go inside the body
-
Postcard from Helsinki Design Week 2025Helsinki Design Week turns 20 this year. Celebrating two decades of design, core themes of this year revolve around happiness and optimism: here are design critic Hugo Macdonald's ten highlights
-
‘Landscape architecture is the queen of science’: Emanuele Coccia in conversation with Bas SmetsItalian philosopher Emanuele Coccia meets Belgian landscape architect Bas Smets to discuss nature, cities and ‘biospheric thinking’
-
An apartment is for sale within Cité Radieuse, Le Corbusier’s iconic brutalist landmarkOnce a radical experiment in urban living, Cité Radieuse remains a beacon of brutalist architecture. Now, a coveted duplex within its walls has come on the market
-
The best of California desert architecture, from midcentury gems to mirrored dwellingsWhile architecture has long employed strategies to cool buildings in arid environments, California desert architecture developed its own distinct identity –giving rise, notably, to a wave of iconic midcentury designs
-
A restored Eichler home is a peerless piece of West Coast midcentury modernismWe explore an Eichler home, and Californian developer Joseph Eichler’s legacy of design, as a fine example of his progressive house-building programme hits the market
-
The Architecture Edit: Wallpaper’s houses of the monthWallpaper* has spotlighted an array of remarkable architecture in the past month – from a pink desert home to structures that appears to float above the ground. These are the houses and buildings that most captured our attention in August 2025
-
La Maison de la Baie de l’Ours melds modernism into the shores of a Québécois lakeACDF Architecture’s grand family retreat in Quebec offers a series of flowing living spaces and private bedrooms beneath a monumental wooden roof
-
This cinematic home in Palm Springs sets a new standard for Desert Modern designJill Lewis Architecture and landscape architecture firm Hoerr Schaudt joined forces to envision an exceptional sanctuary
-
Hilborn House, one of Arthur Erickson’s few residential projects, is now on the marketThe home, first sketched on an envelope at Montreal Airport, feels like a museum of modernist shapes, natural materials and indoor-outdoor living
