Jean Balladur was born on 11 May 1924 in Smyrna (now Izmir in Turkey). He was A French architect, also the first cousin of prime minister Edouard Balladur. After studying literature and philosophy, at the Lycee Condorcet, where he was a pupil of Jean-Paul Sartre, he later turned to architecture. Admitted to the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts in 1949, he joined the Roger-Henri Expert workshop and obtained his diploma in 1953. The links with Sartre remained for several years, he published the magazine Les Temps modernes: The Inside and Out (1949), A Romantic Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright (1955) and Urbanism and Democracy (1956). His main achievement is the city of La Grande Motte seaside resort (1960-1970). Built over a decade it is characterized by architectural homogeneity.