aking in the view of the glittering Mediterranean
from the 27th floor of his new skyscraper in Marseille,
the French architect Jean Nouvel says this city
is ‘blessed by God’. For decades, Marseille seemed
to be cursed – with crime, poverty, corruption,
unemployment – but over the past 20 years a series of
factors has helped to turn things around in France’s
second-largest metropolis. These include a politically
savvy mayor, a high-speed train line to Paris, and the
city’s selection as European Capital of Culture in 2013.
Not least, Marseille is the site of Euroméditerranée,
the biggest urban renovation project in southern
Europe. Launched in 1995, the massive 480-hectare
undertaking is revamping decrepit areas – many
on the waterfront – with snazzy new office buildings,
housing, schools, shops and cinemas. Architecture has
sprung up by prominent names such as Nouvel, Zaha
Hadid, Rudy Ricciotti, Kengo Kuma and Stefano Boeri.
For the first time, Marseille is getting a skyline.
It started with the dramatic 143m-tall building designed
by Hadid for the shipping company CMA CGM
and completed in 2011. This has now been joined by
Nouvel’s 31-floor, 135m-tall tower, due to be inaugurated
on 25 October and cheekily named La Marseillaise.
Nouvel came up with the name, which is also the
title of France’s national anthem. When told that
it seems both obvious and daring, he laughs. ‘It wasn’t
obvious at first, but it’s always been daring.’
La Marseillaise has been a 16-year adventure
in the making, costing close to €200m and requiring
three and a half years of construction. It stands slightly
shorter than the CMA CGM tower, since the shipping
company’s founder, Jacques Saadé, was promised
that his building would remain Marseille’s tallest.
Nouvel conceived this building for the particular
context of Marseille, saying: ‘Tall buildings tend
to repeat themselves. They’re often designed before
anyone even knows where they’re going. I wanted to
show that a tower can have identifying characteristics
and a connection to the place where it’s built.’
The Pritzker Prize-winner came up with his
concept the same way he does for every project: lying
in bed with a mask over his eyes and plugs in his ears,
allowing images to float through his mind, tracing
shapes with his fingers. ‘And at a certain moment,’ he
says, ‘something takes form, I imagine a hypothesis,and I can return triumphantly to the agency, saying,
“Voilà, I know what must be done!”’
Nouvel decided on a very simple construction with
a surprising façade: the tower is covered with vertical
and horizontal brise-soleils. These consist of 3,850
concrete pieces of various formats, fitting together
like a puzzle to frame the windows at differing depths
or angles. Some are grids, others parallel slats or single
panels. ‘I don’t know of any other tower taller than
100m high with brise-soleils,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t exist.’
Made of ultra-high-performance fibre-reinforced
concrete, the brise-soleils filter the sunlight, allowing
for windows in transparent glass (rather than the tinted
or highly reflective ones normally found on a tower) and
crystal-clear views. Local trees such as fig and pine are
planted on the 18th and 19th storeys and again on the
top three floors, like a forest in the sky. Nouvel says this
adds to the building’s feeling of lightness and porosity.
The tower’s other unusual characteristic is
its blue, red and white colour scheme. Nouvel insists
these are not the colours of the French flag but the
shades of Marseille: the ochre roofs, the off-white
clouds and limestone calanques, or inlets, the particular
blue of the sky – and especially the blue of the
city’s beloved football team, Olympique de Marseille.
In fact, there are 30 variations of colour brushed
onto the concrete. This gives the building the look
of an ‘unfinished drawing’, says Nouvel – and with
time, the paint will fade to a softer patina, creating
many more nuances. Each façade is different, designed
to echo its background. The eastern side is mostly blue,
like the sea behind it. When the sun hits the northern
façade, its red imprints onto Hadid’s building – a fact
that delights Nouvel. The southern façade is the most
impressionistic, with an abstract wash of colours. The »T
ABOVE RIGHT, A BRISE-SOLEIL
PARTIALLY FRAMES THE VIEW
OF NEARBY DEVELOPMENTS,
INCLUDING THE EUROMED
CENTRE BY MASSIMILIANO
AND DORIANA FUKSAS, WITH
THE HISTORIC BASILIQUE
NOTRE-DAME DE LA GARDE
IN THE BACKGROUND
BELOW, THE COLOURED
SLATS OF THE BRISE-SOLEILS
EXTEND INTO THE OFFICE
CEILINGS (IN PLASTER,
NOT CEMENT), CREATING
A SENSE OF CONTINUITY
INSIDE AND OUT
Architecture
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