La Tete Carrée Library, Nice, France
The plan, when our excursion from Monaco deposited us in Nice for the afternoon, was markets and coffee — the unhurried version of a city we had a few hours to spend. Mary had been to Nice before; for me it was a first visit, and I was content to let it reveal itself at a walking pace. We were looking forward to the pastries.
Then, somewhere on the way to the markets, the building appeared.
La Tête Carrée — the Square Head — is the Louis Nucéra Library in Nice, inaugurated in 2002. Architect Yves Bayard, working with Francis Chapus, won a 1996 city competition with a proposal to house the library's administrative premises inside what he called an "inhabited monumental sculpture" — inspired by the model of sculptor Sacha Sosno, whose pixelated, obliterated forms were already a signature of the School of Nice. The result is a building that reads, at the right distance, as a giant square face: individual cubic modules that resolve into a human portrait the way halftone dots resolve into a photograph when you step back far enough. Whether this is architecture containing sculpture, or sculpture made habitable, is a question the building declines to answer. From the street, approaching without knowing what you're looking at, it stops you cold.
I did not have time or there equipment—and sometimes, yes, the best camera is not the one you have with you— to do it justice. The excursion schedule, the group, the afternoon not being mine to manage — what I had was the time of a first encounter, and what a first encounter produces: an image made quickly, under the conditions given, with the clear knowledge that the subject deserves more. Nice, the markets, the coffee — all of it receded. The building had taken over. I left knowing I would have to come back and take proper time with it. The title is the accurate account: the building played games with my head, and I drove back to Monaco still thinking about it.
Provenance: iPhone 11 Pro @ 52mm
