MuCEM Marseille
— a cube wearing the shadow of its own lace.
Not only on a wall.
“At the mouth of the Vieux-Port, a black cube wrapped in concrete lace. The architect Rudy Ricciotti called it a moucharabieh, after the latticed screens that filter sunlight in traditional Mediterranean houses, cast here in fibre-reinforced concrete so fine it looks knotted. A 115-metre footbridge runs from the roof across to Fort Saint-Jean, the seventeenth-century fortification on the other side of the channel. The shadow the lattice throws on the floor inside moves all day. Across the harbour, Notre-Dame de la Garde sits on her hill. People come for the collection of Mediterranean civilisation gathered into one place, and stay for the way the building handles light.
MuCEM Marseille, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The MuCEM opened on 7 June 2013, the year Marseille held the title of European Capital of Culture. Its principal building, called the J4, sits on the former dock J4 at the mouth of the Vieux-Port in the second arrondissement of Marseille, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of southern France. A 115-metre footbridge crosses the harbour channel to Fort Saint-Jean, a fortification rebuilt between 1660 and 1664 under Louis XIV, with foundations going back to the twelfth century. The museum's full name is the Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée. It is the first national museum in France dedicated to Mediterranean civilisations, and its collection holds roughly 250,000 objects from across the basin.
The J4 was designed by Marseille architect Rudy Ricciotti, with Roland Carta as associate architect. It is a 72-metre cube of 15,000 square metres on four levels, wrapped on two sides by an outer envelope of fibre-reinforced, ultra-high-performance concrete, the BFUP-class material developed by Lafarge under the name Ductal. Ricciotti has described the perforated outer skin as a moucharabieh, after the latticed wooden screens used to filter light in traditional Mediterranean and North African architecture. The result is a black cube that reads as a dark veil from outside and casts a constantly shifting pattern of shadow inside. The pillars holding up the floors are so slender they read more as reeds than as structural columns.
Marseille receives roughly 2,800 hours of sunshine a year, among the highest totals in France, and the Mediterranean light there is unusually direct. The J4's perforated concrete envelope was designed against that fact. Where most museums treat sunlight as a problem to be filtered out, Ricciotti let it through and used it. From inside, the lattice throws a pattern of shadows across the floor and walls that moves with the hour. From outside, the same envelope reads as a layered black scrim against the sea. Across the harbour, the gilded statue of the Virgin atop Notre-Dame de la Garde takes the same Provençal light from the opposite direction.