Perfect blend

Believed to be the final project drawn by Oscar Niemeyer, the latest architectural pavilion at Château La Coste is inspired by the female form

- DEYAN SUDJIC

The latest addition to Château La Coste's ever-increasing collection of architectural pavilions and art installations is billed as the final project drawn by Oscar Niemeyer. As recently as 2020, the owner of a Leipzig tram factory proudly claimed that a 40ft concrete and glass sphere, pinned to the top corner of one of his buildings, represented Niemeyer's last design (see W*241). As it turns out, Paddy McKillen, the founder of Château La Coste, has simply taken longer to finish his rather more substantial project. And even now, ten years after Niemeyer's death, just a few days short of his 105th birthday, there are still schemes being worked on that carry his name.

Set in the rolling landscape of Provence, and home to works by Frank Gehry, Tracey Emin, Tadao Ando, Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, and Ai Weiwei, Château La Coste now has an 80-seat auditorium that sits inside a circular white concrete drum, attached like a hinge to a teardrop-shaped, 4,000 sq ft glass-walled gallery. It sits in a dip in the vineyards that surround the hotel at Château La Coste, and is reached by a path that curls languidly through the vines, entering the pavilion across a shallow reflecting pool. These are motifs familiar from Niemeyer's earlier buildings. He used water everywhere, from Brasilia to his office building for Mondadori on the edge of Milan. The confrontation of a drum-shaped solid element with free-form glass is a paraphrase of the cultural centre in Le Havre that he finished in 1983.