ARCHITECTURE, MUSEUMS

Marseilles MuCEM Trades Bling-Bling Brightness for Bony Fragility, Sensual Cement
By Stephanie Murg on September 16, 2013 1:49 PM

Its Marseilles moment. The port city, Frances largest on the Mediterranean coast, is in the spotlight as this years European Capital of Culture, with a host of major projects on view. Writer, author, and intrepid flneur Marc Kristal paid a visit to the new and improved Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean and filed this formidable report for us.

(All photos courtesy Rudy Ricciotti)

Comprised of two 15,000-square-metre structuresthe 17th-century Fort St.-John and a new seven-level building by architect Rudy Ricciotti, linked by a slender 115-metre-long footbridgeMarseilles Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean (MuCEM), is, says director Bruno Suzzarelli, an outstretched hand from France to the region. Wishing to refuse the bling-bling brightness of signature-building starchitecture, Ricciotti responded to the forts massiveness with a bony, feminine, fragile design, executed almost entirely in high-strength concrete, and distinguished by a densely-patterned screen that covers two elevations and folds onto, and projects off of, the roof. Seven hundred and eleven of the 15,688 cubic metres of MuCEMs signature building material are comprised of fiber-reinforced ultra high performance concrete (UHPC), which proved especially suitable to the project: UHPCs closed-pore compounding renders it virtually impervious to sea spray and other corrosive agents, and the highly flowable substance can adapt to the most elaborate moldsideal for MuCEMs latticework panels. Ricciotti also appreciated the material for its narrative qualities. Cement can inspire dread in certain slums and elsewhere touch the sublime, he observes. And cement gives off a formidable sensuality.

MuCEMs 384 UHPC screen panels, each measuring six by eight meters, were made by Bonna Sabla, a Paris-based concern specializing in precast concrete elements, at their Vendargues plant. Double-sided vertical molds produced a comprehensively smooth finish. The challenge of precasting UHPC, explains Jean-Aim Shu, a director at Lafarge, the company which supplied MuCEMs concrete, involves making sure the reinforcing fibers are equally distributedthe form of the mold and the way you pour both have an influence, he says. A so-called suitability test verified success. Despite being only 10 centimeters thick, the 1450-kilogram panels on MuCEMs southern and western elevations actually stand one on top of another, with those at the ground level supporting the full weight of the two stacked directly abovean extraordinary feat for elements so slender, porous and visually light-seeming. Each faade incorporates three rows of 24 vertically-positioned panels; pole-like braces, extending over the catwalks from the buildings structural faades and attached to the screens by cross-shaped joints, create stabilityespecially useful during Marseilles mistral season, when winds can exceed ninety kilometers an hour. The 1120-kilogram rooftop screens, 7 centimeters in thickness, rest on metal frames and lie horizontally atop T-shaped UHPC brackets, from which theyre slightly separated by polyurethane springs.

In addition to functioning as art-protecting brise-soleils and windbreaks for the catwalks, the screens enable MuCEM, in Ricciottis formulation, to wear its shadows on its face. As the iconography of an institution embracing European, African and Asian cultures, the patterns suggest everything from mashrabiya windows and desiccated stone to fishnet stockings and mantillas. Seen from the interior spaces, the screens serve as a quiet yet insistent presencea reminder of the architectures power and MuCEMs mission. New York-based architecture and design writer Marc Kristals books include Immaterial World, The Great American House, and Magni Modernism.