Le village magique. Le Club Méditerrannée inaugure le temps du loisir, 1950-1970

Abstract

In 2020, the Laboratoire Infrastructure, Architecture, Territoire (LIAT) of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Paris-Malaquais is launching a new cross-disciplinary research theme « MAGIE. La déraison des infrastructures » with the support of the Bureau of Architectural, Urban and Landscape Research (BRAUP) of the French Ministry of Culture. The middle of the 20th century constitutes a keystone in the evolution of the tourist phenomenon in Europe: it is notably between the 1950s and 1970s, decades characterized by the intense and generalized economic development of European countries, that we witness the affirmation of seaside tourism which will become mass. In this context, the text analyzes the appearance of the first “villages magiques” of Cefalu (1950) in Sicily and Djerba (1954) in Tunisia, pioneers of the beginning of the history of the Club de la Méditerranée. The villages of tents and then straw huts, immersed in a dense and virgin nature in the immediate vicinity of the coastal villages, simulating the realization of the immemorial dream of Eden: of the return of man to the first nature. The village tends to reproduce an exotic and magical atmosphere inspired by distant places of the collective imagination; it also offers a return to the primitive dimension of man in nature, between transgression and extraordinary fantasy, which will make it enter the list of heterotopias “Des espaces autres” by Michel Foucault (1984). It was from the Sixties that the gentrification and the development of a family clientele were accompanied by an increased demand for comfort, contributing to the birth of new architectural forms. The new straw huts of the Club de la Méditerranée in Arziy, (1961) in Israel, designed with a morphological architecture in straw and wood on a project by the architects Alfred Neumann, Zvi Hecker and Eldar Sharon will be the shelter for the nomadic man of the 20th century. But the “magic” of the villages is just as much that of the experience they promise, that of “Polynesia five hours from Paris” and immediate transport to a faraway place, in a context of democratization of access to vacations and the increase in the duration of paid leave. The “villages magiques” and successively the Club Med are real places of rupture with the outside world and the suspension of ordinary life, true demonstrators of the very functioning of architecture as a story to be lived, this fundamental character from which no project escapes.