Antti Lovag Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Antti Lovag (1920-2014) was an architect of Hungarian and Finnish background, based in France, who rejected the straight line as “an aggression against nature”. Calling himself a habitologist rather than an architect, he designed and built bubble houses of sprayed concrete on the French Riviera, above all the Maison Bernard and the Palais Bulles in Théoule-sur-Mer, later owned by the fashion designer Pierre Cardin.

Budapest, Stockholm and Paris

Lovag was born in Budapest in 1920 and spent his youth between Hungary, Finland and Sweden. After the Second World War he studied architecture in Stockholm and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and worked with Jean Prouvé, whose experimental approach to construction influenced him.

Habitology and the bubble

From the 1960s Lovag developed the idea of “habitologie”: designing homes around the movements and needs of the body, with curved spaces built from steel armatures and sprayed concrete, often shaped directly on site. The circle and the sphere, he believed, were more natural for human life than the cube.

Maison Bernard and the Palais Bulles

For the industrialist Pierre Bernard he built the Maison Bernard in Théoule-sur-Mer (from 1971), a cluster of bubbles overlooking the sea. Nearby, he designed the Palais Bulles (1975-1989), originally for Bernard and later bought by Pierre Cardin, a cascade of red-orange bubbles with an amphitheatre that became a landmark of the Côte d’Azur. Lovag died in Tourrettes-sur-Loup in 2014.