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Architect and engineer, National Grand Architecture Prize winner, Knight of the French Legion of Honor, Officer of Arts and Letters, Officer of the National Order of Merit… Decorated like a general, the Republic’s medals don’t stop Rudy Ricciotti going to each building site as if to battle.
By Sarah Carrière-Chardon - Photos DR - February 8, 2012
Born in Algiers, he spent his childhood in the Camargue region, from which he preserves a wild and briny taste with - as Proust’s madeleine - a sea anemone omelet that today he enjoys at the restaurant Passédat. After a detour via Geneva to study engineering, he finished his studies at the National Architecture School of Marseille. Since then, he’ll only be convinced to leave the south to work on compelling international projects. Setting up his agency in Bandol in 1980, he brings the world to him. Thus, among his 30 or so collaborators – architects, city planners, landscape architects – no less than 13 different languages are spoken,
including English, German, Vietnamese but also Greek, Arabic and the Provençal dialect…
Among his major projects of the moment, Rudi Ricciotti has just designed the Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton, delivering a setting of light and shadow, of magisterial fullness and freedom. The MuCEM (Museum of Civilizations from Europe and the Mediterranean) in Marseille dialogs with land and sky, plays with the mineral and maritime horizons that Ricciotti wanted to be a “vertical Kasbah.” The “flying carpet” of the future Islamic Arts department will alight in the Visconti courtyard of the Louvre, when the ITER headquarters in Cadarache will breath in the nature
surrounding it with its intelligent membrane. Another venture, the Black Pavilion in Aix en Provence, is already demonstrating the beginnings of his team’s forthcoming architectural influence. “This project reports strictly to the dictatorship of mathematics. Dislocating the origin of emotion, in this sense, it pays a tribute to effort and hard work, to skin and bones, championing the strong over the weak.” Delivered on a confined terrain, it became the flag of a contemporary architecture that gains ground over the neo-Provencal. The word is out, amongst these constant enemies, the ravages of buildings that owe nothing to the culture of a place. Chasing the “Foxes from the Temple” even beyond his favorite territories, he denounces the false
consumerist pretenses of the HQE (High Environmental Quality) label. Taking the context of each place as the parameter, Rudy Ricciotti convenes matter, light, mineral and vegetable to construct an urban contemporary story. Founded on the influences of antique and Arab cultures, viscerally Mediterranean, he adds parameters from his time: those of cutting-edge techniques and materials. Working concretes to their extreme capacities, never have Greek porticos, arabesques, moucharabis, or Roman aqueducts been revisited with such a sensual and minimal vision. An engineer, his drawings are confirmed mathematically; an architect, his calculations outline the tensions.
A ne pas manquer
A manifesto on each delivery, it’s in the construction of cultural buildings or even schools, like in Manosque, that Ricciotti confirms his commitment to a “new humanism founded on respect for nature and a renewed alliance between earth and sky and sculpture of lights and shadows.”
VOIR TOUTES LES PHOTOS
International School ITER in Manosque © Agence Rudy Ricciotti
Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton © Ville de Menton
© Agence Rudy Ricciotti
Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton © Ville de Menton
MUCEM in Marseille © Agence Rudy Ricciotti
Le Pavillon Noir in Aix-en-Provence © Philippe Ruault
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