Tête carrée

Tête carrée rises thirty metres in the heart of Nice as a monumental sculpture and working building. A massive aluminium bust supports a fourteen-metre cube, creating the unmistakable image of a head with geometric features.

Yves Bayard developed the design with Francis Chapus and the artist Sacha Sosno after winning Nice’s 1996 competition for a central library. Completed in 2002, the cube contains seven floors of administrative offices for the Louis Nucéra Library, while the sculpture’s pale grey surface echoes the nearby MAMAC’s marble walls. Four-millimetre square openings in the aluminium create its distinctive matte finish, and the structure remains closed to public access.

At night, Yann Kersalé’s lighting changes colour for different events, turning the cube and bust into a shifting landmark above the city.

City: Nice
Content updated: 2026-06-22

Image: Patrice SemeriaPublic domain
Image: James Anderson, derivative work: M0tty (talk)Public domain
Image: OpenStreetMap contributors CC BY-SA 3.0

Take this page with you

The myTuur app is free, and once you are standing at a spot its story starts by itself.

Spots like this one are the stops myTuur strings into tours through Nice. In the app, each story begins where you stand: walk up to a spot and it starts, read it on screen or listen as you go, then follow the route to the next one.

What is myTuur?

myTuur is a free city-guide app. Its tours are built from spots, and each spot carries a story that starts when you get there, to read or to listen to as you like.