Immeuble Gloria Mansions

The Immeuble Gloria Mansions is a large Art Deco apartment building in Nice, built between 1932 and 1934. Its architects, Garabed Hovnanian and Kevork Arsenian, were Armenian by origin and American by training. The client, Joachim Nahapiet, was an Iranian-born developer who had made his fortune in the United States. The design follows the apartment-hotel model of early twentieth-century New York: flats with kitchens instead of hotel rooms. Garabed's brothers Barouyr and Hrant Hovnanian carried out the construction. The workforce was almost entirely Armenian, with a single Kurdish worker among them.

Up close, the façade is a granito finish over reinforced concrete. Mother-of-pearl flakes run through the cement, and in sunlight the whole surface sparkles. Cylindrical balconies alternate, some centred and some offset, meeting the vertical pillars at varying intervals in a wave-like rhythm. Two main wings wrap around a courtyard that brings daylight into both sections. Twelve shops open straight onto the street at ground level. On the roof, two cement eagles keep watch, inspired by the chrome-steel gargoyles of New York's Chrysler Building. Protected as a historic monument since 1989, the building also holds the Patrimoine du XXe siècle label.

Inside, the central staircase rises through an elliptical shaft that starts on the first floor, not at ground level. You reach it by a symmetrical French-style double flight. The green artificial-cement stairs wind in exuberant curves around eight free-standing columns. Daylight comes through a large polychrome glass panel that the painter Lassale made to a design by Mahokian. It shows a maritime landscape from Théoule, at the entrance to the Estérel. The glass pieces are only two or three millimetres thick, and the effect recalls the pointillism of Signac and Seurat.