ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the design of the Hexacube (1968–1975), a modular, prefabricated, camping system from polyester fiberglass designed by Anja Blomstedt and promoted by Georges Candilis at the seaside resort of Leucate-Barcarès in Southwestern France. The chapter addresses the social transformations and coastal tourist developments in 1960s France, investigating how architecture co-shaped the postwar mass-leisure culture, finding there a laboratory for new ideas and new forms. A testimony to those transformations, the Hexacube, is here examined against Candilis’ perception of mass leisure and his general design strategies at Leucate-Barcarès, as well as in the context of the plastic micro-architecture developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The Hexacube exemplifies the convergence of consumption and citizenship that underpinned the postwar emergence of mass leisure, linked to notions of mobility, growth, change, and freedom.
