Marseilles docks: body, sentiment and wonder
The Docks are historically located on the axis between the sea and the city of Marseilles; this strong and distinct cut of the territory lets us transform this building into a dialog place. Our concept aimed to rebuild the link between the city and the sea. The Docks became a permeable, porous place; they create a landscape between city and nature.
Thus we recreate a place in continuity with the longitudinal axis accross the buildings located at the Docks end that respectivally give onto two squares: an historical one "Place de la Joliette" and another on the point of emerging, "Place de la Méditerranée". The project becomes a real space of exchanges and interactions between two Marseilles parts.
We also reinterpreted the spaces organisation that communicate together, with the city and the sea and created a new place of sociability strongly marked by the theme of the Mediterranean territory.
The proposal includes an intervention on the Docks base in order to move from a closed system to an opened one, articulated with penetrations, transparencies and creates a place continuing to the sea.
The project redefines the four courtyards destined to be commercial, artistic and cultural that, from inside, extend towards the two exterior places and the two adjacent streets. We create four breaks inside a transverse route.
The Right to Matter
The stone of Provence is the beginning of a journey about Matter that brought to the Docks the plants of Florence, the ceramics of Albisola, the 7 blue in ceramic of Modena, the mirror elements created with the glass of Murano and Venice, the wood sculpted in Rosavenda, the laser-cut aluminium from Cossato (Piedmontese), the metal mesh, the steel and the savoir-faire of Turin, the windows of Bergam and the Milanese light.
A journey between France and Italy with artists, craftsmen, manufacturers who recreated the virtuous dialog of the Marseilles Docks new soul. We intensively wanted all of that because the project is a story, or even better several stories in which Matter is the place of research and challenge, dialog and will, tiredness and joy, culture and thought. Next to all these elements, there is the Matter that is found deeply and not only on the surface, acts like a slow movement in the rapid dynamics of the contemporary life, forces us to think, try, test, confront, handle the conflict, dialog, evoluate.