History — Facades of Nice

Nice has no exceptional monuments such as Notre-Dame in Paris or the Colosseum in Rome, but it does have surprisingly varied facades, the result of a century that can be placed between 1860 and 1960.
Before that century it was a medium-sized town built like its Mediterranean neighbours, with narrow lanes, “jalousie” shutters and religious buildings.
See: The Baroque Old Town (in French)

At the beginning of the 19th century Nice, a town of 23,000 inhabitants, was attached to Savoy, which wanted to carry out Turin-style urban planning with entirely Italian architecture. In 1832 the Consiglio d’Ornato (Council of Ornament) set up a layout for the city with main axes and perpendicular cross streets (as in Turin), although the many hills disturb this scheme. The buildings below were planned in this way.

Place Masséna
Port Lympia with the church of the Immaculate Conception, at the time the church of Notre-Dame du Port, and the two twin palaces
Promenade des Anglais
Place Garibaldi

See: Consiglio d’Ornato (in French)

The annexation of the County of Nice by France in 1860 and the arrival of the railway in 1864 made possible a cosmopolitan tourism that kept growing until the war of 1940. If the English invented tourism, it was in Nice and its region that they developed it. At that time, nobles and wealthy people wanted to spend the bad days of winter in the sun of the “Côte d’Azur”. They had magnificent residences built, or stayed for months or weeks in luxurious palaces. This led to the development of an eclectic architecture: whether the architects were local or foreign, the building orders came from these many “tourists” from different countries of Europe and America. Many buildings were also built in the “Haussmann” style, but as the period was that of “Art Nouveau”, the architecture of this time was highlighted by an abundance of motifs drawn more from the culture of the region than from this new fashion. This gave the style of those years the name “Belle Époque”.

Negresco
12 to 18 rue du Châteauneuf
Hôtel Régina
... see the section “Belle Époque” (in French)

And even places of worship

Built in the style of their country of origin. See: Nice Belle Époque (in French).

After the First World War, although the Belle Époque style remained for some time following the Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1925, it was replaced by the simpler, more stripped-down Art Deco style, with its geometric forms and mosaic replacing frescoes. Towards the end of the period, concrete brought the appearance of volumes.

See: Nice in the Roaring Twenties (in French).

From the 1940s, especially after the war, until the mid-1960s, the “Modern Movement”, which had already begun around 1930, was dominant, although influenced by the Niçois style of the 1930s. There was a search for a new aesthetic, more sober and more stripped-down, shaped by the constraints of new standards and by interior functionality.

After this period the style of Nice’s buildings became less distinctive, as international standardisation took precedence over regional culture.
But public buildings brought a new, rather international aesthetic.

A century of architecture, an article from the weekly magazine Le Point (in French).

See the heritage sheets (in French)

Some of the information we have noted on this site about these buildings was researched on the website PSS-ARCHI.EU, which we invite you to discover for the whole of French and European architectural heritage.

We created this photo site of the facades of Nice so that you can discover all these riches.