Marseilles Docks

The Marseilles Docks as a place of reflexion and meeting between territory and city, past and future, users and inhabitants of the place. The Marseilles Docks as a place of architecture which is an answer to a specific context: an intervention on sensitivity and place specificity, Marseilles in relation to the Docks, the city and the sea. An intervention on the Docks ground level to create an opened system connected to penetration, transparencies and new relations extending to the sea. An intervention on people flow to give different intensities to the place.

We like to think that we achieved to bring a sensual dimension to the place and the project, thanks to the rediscovery of the light, transparency, nature, colours, the new inhabitants (the gecko and the dragonfly of the Docks) and through a Wall of Words that relate the identity of a place, a city, a sea... the Mediterranean.

Marseilles Docks: a monument, a symbol, an urban hyphen. Give right back to the matter. Design spaces in a sensual way, with reactions to the light, to our imagination and our sensuality. Create a sort of privacy hidden inside that reveals the Docks soul et permits the meeting and the rapprochement of people. Create a team work with an artist, craftsmen, manufacturers and a construction firm. Accept and win the bureaucratic, technical and cultural challenges. Share a route achieved thanks to a continuous commitment of all the teams. Go out to give up the cynicism of the malls built in the early twenty years and seek to create a PLACE. Invent colours, matters, lights, animals, words staging. Talk and look for the poetry of a meeting between past and present, light’s sensuality that modifies the matter, the matter that becomes alive. And this matter is the ceramics, made by Casalgrande Padana, is settled on steel railings signed Bodino Engineering. It is decorated with plants from Gruppo Giardini and Murano’s glass created by Ferromurano. The geckos and the dragonflies, new inhabitants of the Docks, were realized by the artist Danilo Trogu. Les Docks de Marseille.