Marseille The Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations

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Marseille
Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la
Méditerranée
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The Museum of European and Mediterranean
Civilizations, which is being inaugurated by
French President Francois Hollande June 2013, is
the centerpiece of Marseille's turn as the
European Capital of Culture for 2013, which aims
to attract 10 million visitors to the city this
year.
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Officials see it as a chance to transform the
ravaged image of the metropolis, which was once a
crossroad of Mediterranean civilization and
bastion of the ancient Greeks, but is now
considered one of Europe's deadliest cities. Four
decades of widespread poverty in Marseille saw
the rise of a powerful mob scene, including a
criminal underworld of drugs, prostitution and
gambling. There were 24 fatal shootings in 2012
alone.
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"We continue to present Marseille in national and
foreign media just by crime, dirt, and letting
itself go. ... We forget that Marseille has a
beautiful history, contributing to the rich
civilization of the Mediterranean," said Bruno
Suzzarelli, the museum's director. He said that
the museum can help rebrand the city's
image. Marseille, Frances principal
Mediterranean seaport, is European Capital of
Culture 2013. Of the many new buildings opening
this year, by far the most prestigious is the
191-million Musée des Civilisations de lEurope
et de la Méditerranée, or MuCEM.
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Conceived in 2000 as part of the 7-billion
Euroméditerrannée redevelopment of the citys
docks, the MuCEM as an institution has a curious
history. Its ancestor is the Musée National des
Arts et Traditions Populaires (MATP), founded in
1937 as a national museum of ethnography that
collected everything from guignols (puppets) to
rural interiors and regional costumes. By the end
of the millennium its location in Pariss Bois de
Boulogne (far from the city centre) and its
ageing building were taking their toll on visitor
numbers and on the quality of displays
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It was at this point that the authorities decided
to decentralise the MATP and move it to
Marseille in the hope of achieving a brilliant
symbiosis the moribund museum would be reborn in
its new setting, while the troubled regional
capital would benefit à la Bilbao from the
presence of a prestigious national collection in
an eye-catching building
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To this end the museum was allocated a
spectacular site the historic Fort St-Jean
(13th-17th centuries), which guards the entrance
to the Vieux Port, as well as the adjacent J4
pier, right on the waters edge with sweeping
westward views to the setting sun. Thirteen
years, three French presidents and six culture
ministers later, the MuCEM has finally opened.
And more than just a French folklore museum, it
aims to be a pluridisciplinary, multi-textual
institution of a type never seen before.
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The MuCEM actually occupies three buildings as
well as the aforementioned Fort St-Jean and J4,
there is also another new building (by Corinne
Vezzoni et Associés) in Marseilles Belle-de-Mai
quarter, where the MATP collections are
conserved, and these reserves can be visited. But
the main exhibitions are held down on the
waterfront, partly in the beautifully restored
(by François Botton, architecte en chef des
monuments historiques) Fort St-Jean, but mostly,
given the latters poky spaces and complicated
layout, in the giant new J4 building
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J4s design was the object of a 2002
architectural competition, which resulted in
general surprise when starchitects Hadid, Holl
and Koolhaas were thrown overboard in favour of
an almost-unknown local based just up the coast
in Bandol Rudy Ricciotti. Little-known back
then, Ricciotti is now ineluctable in the French
scene, partly because of high-profile projects
such as the Pavillon Noir dance studios in
Aix-en-Provence (AR February 2007), the Musée
Jean-Cocteau in Menton (2011) and the Islamic-art
galleries at the Louvre (2012), but also because
of his colourful and conspicuous public persona,
which has made him a media darling that many in
the architectural profession love to hate.
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Rudy Ricciotti (born 1952) is an Algerian-born
French architect and publisher. He was born in
Kouba, Algeria of Italian-gipsy origin and moved
to France at the age of three. He studied
engineering in Switzerland and he graduated from
the École Nationale Supérieure dArchitecture de
Marseille in 1980. He also runs a small
publishing house, Al Dante, which publishes
photography, essays on architecture, and poetry,
including a French translation of John Ashbery
He is a recipient of the Legion of Honor, the
Order of Arts and Letters and the National Order
of Merit.
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Square in plan (72 x 72m) and box-like in volume
- a deliberate rejection of Gehry-esque formal
contortions (dismissed as bling bling) and a
gesture of humility towards the Fort St-Jean -
the J4 building comprises an inner volume of 52 x
52 x 18m containing a basement auditorium and two
floors of glass-fronted gallery space.
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Around this inner box, on two sides, are wrapped
bands of glass-fronted administrative spaces like
sunshades, while the other two are veiled in a
lacy concrete mesh, which also covers the roof,
except for the open-air terrace.
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The J4 comprises two circulation routes, one
eminently practical - a central set of stairs and
lifts - the other a long, meandering promenade
architecturale, which takes the form of a
ziggurat of ramps running around the 52 x 52m
core, behind the admin spaces and the mesh,
linking all the levels from basement to roof
terrace.
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The promenade then continues from the roof onto
the Fort St-Jean via a 135m-long footbridge
spanning a water-filled basin, and another
footbridge connects the fort to the historic
Panier quarter on the hill, making the promenade
grandly urban and - if Ricciottis wish that it
be open to all comers (not just ticketholders) is
observed - generous in scale.
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Approaching the J4 building from the dockside
road, you see a generic-looking glassy box, and
nor are the dingy entrance hall and poky internal
circulation spaces encouraging. But as you enter
the galleries the magic starts. This may be the
cultural equivalent of warehouse or retail space,
but no supermarket was ever so soigné, Ricciotti
having gone to great lengths to devise a system
of floor beams that allow lighting and ducting to
be accommodated within them without false
ceilings.
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And then there is the Mediterranean, veiled
behind its concrete mantilla (and, on sunny days,
diaphanous black curtains), tantalisingly present
but never intrusive.
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Stepping onto the ziggurat ramps, you enter a
quite extraordinary space, bristling with
stainless-steel tie and suspension rods whose
pins-and-needles ballet is dappled with shade
from the concrete mesh, behind which winks and
scintillates the mythical Mediterranean.
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Arriving on the roof terrace, which is partly
shaded by the concrete mantilla and serves the
inevitable panoramic restaurant, you are
confronted by the sensuously moulded footbridge,
which shoots off across the abyss in a minimal
(minimum? phallic?) marker-pen streak.
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Once on the Fort St-Jean, you enjoy sweeping
views of the J4 in its wider setting, a
charcoal-grey shadow to the fort, its concrete
shawl evoking not just flamenco Spain but the
mashrabiyas of the caliphates, the pattern of
reflected ripples on a sandy seabed, or the
late-summer cracks of the Camargue mudflats where
Ricciotti spent his boyhood.
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Text and pictures Internet All copyrights belong
to their respective owners Presentation Sanda
Foisoreanu
2013
Sound Toto Cutugno - Mediterraneo