The J4 Building and its Concrete Lattice
Rudy Ricciotti, with Roland Carta (Rudy Ricciotti born 1952) · 2009 to 2013
A dark cube stands at the edge of the water where the old port meets the open sea, wrapped in a lace of concrete so fine that from a distance it looks like a fishing net or the shadow of leaves. Up close the lace turns out to be a shell of ultra high performance concrete, a material that can be cast thinner and stronger than any ordinary concrete, and it hangs a few metres outside the glass walls of the museum like a mantilla. Between the shell and the glass run ramps that spiral slowly from the ground to the roof, always in the shade, always with the sea flickering through the holes.
Rudy Ricciotti, an architect from nearby Bandol who has spent his career fighting for concrete as a noble material, wanted a building that felt Mediterranean rather than international, dense and shadowy rather than shiny. Look at the columns inside, tall thin trunks that branch like trees, and at the way the lattice pattern never repeats. The concrete contains no visible steel reinforcement; it is threaded with fine fibres instead, which is what allows the delicacy. In the late afternoon the sun comes low through the western wall and prints the pattern across the floors.
The museum opened in June twenty thirteen, when Marseille was European Capital of Culture, on the site of the old J4 quay where ships once loaded for Algeria and Corsica. It was the first national museum in France to be built outside Paris, and it took the collections of the former museum of popular arts and traditions in Paris and gave them a Mediterranean home. Whatever the exhibitions inside, the building itself is the reason many people come.
Did You Know? The lattice panels were cast one by one in moulds, no two alike, and craned into place around the finished glass box.
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