2010 — Living Space Odyssey

In 1968, Antti Lovag began to build a 1600 square metre spherical house near Nice. Now he is ninety, and the construction has just been completed.

About the Frenchman Antti Lovag — who is not an architect, but rather calls himself a "habitologist" — there are so many legends that one is almost surprised at how easy it is to meet him in the mountain village behind Saint-Paul de Vence, in the small, green, spherical house that reminds a person a little of the Barbapapa children's books, and a little of a poisonous squid.

Next to this green sphere, in which he has lived for decades, stands the large house, for which he has given up everything else: a biosphere, as if it could stand on the moon, with 1600 square metres of living space. That is, if one can even speak of square metres in this house that is characterized above all by the absence of square forms. One of the most amazing buildings erected in the twentieth century, the home features a spherical hall in which a jungle of cacti and palm trees grow above real rocks and a stream trickles, surrounded by countless intimate spherical spaces grouped together in which light falls through plexiglass hoods, and in which one lays as though in a grotto. The very old and the very new became one form here, since sometimes the building is reminiscent of a spaceship, sometimes of an archaic cave.

When Lovag was commissioned in 1967 by a man named Antoine Gaudet, a mighty figure on the Paris Stock Exchange, to build this four-hundred-metre-long utopian spherical world on the rock plateau, the architect, already in his late forties, had designed several spherical houses - one of which now belongs to fashion designer Pierre Cardin - and had a life behind him that offers enough material for a great adventure novel.

At some point Gaudet lost interest in the project. Lovag, whom he had granted a lifelong right of abode on the property, no longer received any assignments. At this point, the biosphere fell into disrepair, it was still a construction site in the front and ruined in the back. For thirty years Lovag lived without assignments in his sphere, in which models and design drawings piled up like in a time capsule, and saw his design, for which he had given up everything, fall apart. Then a rich Englishman came, invested a two-digit million sum and completed the spherical utopia in one year. Today Lovag is ninety years old. He can no longer walk -- he is trapped in his sphere - but he has experienced the completion of the work. And now, he says, he wants to create something completely new.

Text: Niklas Maak