The Footbridge to Fort Saint-Jean
Rudy Ricciotti (born 1952) · 2013
From the roof of the new museum a narrow black bridge shoots straight across the water to the top of the old fort, more than a hundred metres long and so thin that from below it looks like a line drawn with a ruler. It is made of the same fibre reinforced concrete as the building's lattice, cast in sections and posted across the channel with no support in the middle. Walking it is the best moment of a visit: the sea on one side, the port on the other, the cathedral and the city ahead, and a slight sway underfoot if the wind is up.
The bridge is a feat of engineering hiding as a simple gesture. Ordinary concrete could never span this distance at this thinness; the ultra high performance mix, developed by French engineers in the nineteen nineties, is several times stronger and lets the deck be only a few centimetres thick at the edges. Notice how the bridge lands on the fort not at a gate but on the ramparts themselves, so that you arrive on top of the walls the way a defender would have. A second footbridge, on the far side of the fort, crosses to the Panier district and the church of Saint Laurent.
For most of its history Fort Saint-Jean was closed to the people of Marseille, a military zone and then a ruin, and the bridges were the first way in. Ricciotti wanted the museum to stitch the city back to its oldest corner, and this is the stitch. Cross it slowly and look down; the channel below is the entrance to the Vieux-Port, used by ships since the Greeks founded the city twenty six centuries ago.
Did You Know? The bridge deck was floated across the channel and lifted into place by crane in sections during the final months of construction.
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