Antibes - Villa Today
- department: Alpes-Maritimes
- common: Antibes
- naming: Villa Today
- address: 1546 boulevard Maréchal Juin - Cap d'Antibes
- Author: Barry DIERKS (architect)
- date: 1938
- protection: unprotected building
- label patrimoine XXe: Commission régionale du patrimoine et des sites (CRPS) of 28 November 2000
Built in 1938, the villa belongs to the end of the period of the beautiful flowering of buildings intended for summer resort. By 1923 the idea of a summer season was in the air, But it was the American billionaire Frank Jay Gould who knew how to orient fashion and invent the summer holidays by encouraging hoteliers to open their establishments from spring rather than winter as was practiced in the 19th century. With his wife Florence, they attracted friends and contacts, artists and billionaires, for sporting and elegant activities full sun, but also cultural and worldly. They financed the launch of Juan-les-Pins in 1924 and the construction of the Palais de la Méditerranée in Nice from 1926. They were relayed by Gerald and Sara Murphy, who had settled in the heart of Cap d'Antibes, to the America villa, of which they made until 1932 the center of a refined and warm life in which participated Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Serge Diaghilev or Pablo Picasso.
Mrs Audrey Chadwick belonged to this well-to-do, largely American, nomadic society, which was bound by the same lifestyle and attracted the seductions of the French Riviera. It was probably his relations that recommended him this architect installed on the coast and whose training in the U.S.A. could seem to him a guarantee for a creation reminding him of the spirit of Art Deco modernity of Miami. In fact, she owned a villa in Palm Beach that she called Today...
Barry Dierks (1899-1960) belongs to the generation of architects who were able to grasp the novelty of the Modern Movement to renovate the tradition of eclecticism still rule for large residences. A graduate of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh in 1921, he attended the teaching of the Jaussely workshop from 1921 to 1923 at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and settled on the coast in 1925 in his first realization, the Villa du Trident in Théoule, with his friend and partner Eric Sawyer, who looked after the agency’s finances. We know him, from Menton to Six-Fours (Var), at least 70 houses, including 21 in Cap d'Antibes, where he combined, with skill, comfort and technical novelty in a modernity marked by a rigorous classicism and a warm Mediterranean atmosphere.
The darling of good society, he established, through his social life and then his charitable activities during the Second World War, bonds of trust and friendship with a clientele that was largely Anglo-Saxon.
The villa replaces a light construction of the turn of the century, named the Bungalow. It rises on a field which the architect liked to say had the surface of a grand piano. He exploited its small size to organize a distribution of the most classic that develops on a ground floor and a floor, with a partial basement floor housing notably the garage. In the main body, a series of reception and living rooms opens wide on the panorama of Golfe-Juan and Juan-les-Pins by windows sliding in the thickness of the walls. This privileged location seduced Jack Warner who, once the owner, received the greatest stars of the cinema, from Charlie Chaplin to Ava Gardner. Barry Dierks gave the front façade this extraordinary undulating movement to house services on either side of a half-moon where guests' cars come to line up. Monumentality combines here the symmetry of the central volumes, whose curves owe much to Borromini, and the uncertainty of a dissymmetry that the walker discovers while moving. Modernity unifies and gives a rhythm to the surfaces, while retaining baroque models that are magnified by the Mediterranean whiteness.
- Editor: François Fray, drac paca sri, 2000