Ricciotti, architect

The French architect's retrospective at the Cité de l’Architecture is all about images. The only exception are Ricciotti’s prototypes or “testimonies to the memory of the work”: impressive, instructive and intriguing.

Concrete is, as Adrian Forty describes it, “one of the agents through which our experience of modernity is mediated” and this because it “realizes the prospect of transforming nature, and of transforming ourselves and our relationship with each other.” [1] Certainly French architect Rudy Ricciotti understands and challenges these particularities of the material, bringing concrete from its modern origin into the heart of postmodernity. Yet the ways in which this major player in the new wave of French architecture has — over the past twenty-something years — used concrete, and talks about architecture, is far from reaching unanimity. In fact, his most recent retrospective — “Ricciotti, Architecte,” currently on view at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris — will certainly be the object of much media attention and debate.

"Rudy Ricciotti, architect", installation view at the Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris. Photo © CAPA/Gaston Bergeret, 2013

Born in 1952 in Kouba, Algeria, Ricciotti graduated from the Geneva Engineering School in 1974 and from the Marseille School of Architecture in 1980. Around the same year, he opened his office in the south of France, starting his career building villas on the Côte d’Azur. But Ricciotti soon received several important commissions: Vitrolle’s Stadium, completed in 1994 — his favourite —, the Black Pavilion in Aix-en-Provence (1994-2004), the Nicolaisaal Auditorium in Potsdam (1996-2000), and many others. Recently, he worked on two major cultural projects in France: the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditérranée (MuCEM) in Marseille and the Islamic wing of the Louvre. Although in 2006, Ricciotti was awarded France’s Grand Prix d’Architecture, recognising his outstanding contribution to architecture, the public has had to wait seven years to finally see his first solo show at the Cité de l’Architecture.

Ricciotti is the sort of enfant terrible of French architecture. He doesn't particularly like displaying his work. Fond of controversy, the architect would rather fetch his detractors through all sorts of public appearances and his writing (such as in his most recent book L’Architecture est un sport de combat or in Culture as a deadly weapon, an essay he published in 2008). His battlegrounds are the over-used term “green architecture” — which he likes to debunk, using the term “green terror” instead — and what he deplores as a sort of Koolhaasian minimalism. Ricciotti also insists on the importance of collective work. For him, the architect is nothing more than a conductor, who needs to depend on the work of a myriad other specialists to whom he likes to pay tribute.

Ricciotti’s work focuses on skin and ornaments. It is an architecture that aims at communicating with users, mostly through the exploration of the material’s potential. “We can do anything with concrete”, says Ricciotti. “As long as we love it, speak to it and put it in tension.” Thus Ricciotti’s work cannot but make one think about a certain return to postmodernism’s strong attachment to communication. His attachment to context and the favouring of continuity and historical perspective is also reminiscent of the dominant attitude of the 1970s and 1980s.

The retrospective at the Cité de l’Architecture is all about images. Hundreds of images depicting various projects invade large 7,24 x 2,72-metre screens. Ricciotti’s work is also present in watercolours by Yvan The visitor can also interact with two touch screen terminals at the end of the show. The only exception to this reign of images — where no original drawings, sketches or reduce scaled models are presented to the visitors — are Ricciotti’s prototypes or, “testimonies to the memory of the work”, as the architect likes to call them. These real-scale fragments or moulds exemplify Ricciotti’s work with ultra high performance concrete, a material that smells, looks and feels like concrete, but because of its extremely high density, far exceeds the possibilities of reinforced concrete. Impressive, instructive and intriguing, the fragments could have been more fully exploited: Why not make better use of the exhibition space by hanging these pieces from the ceiling instead of simply displaying them on the floor?

Now juggling with a variety of important French commissions, Rudy Ricciotti’s studio could not whish for a better timing to bring awareness to their work, rendering it accessible to international tourists. Nonetheless, one could question the real purpose of an exhibition that seems to give so little to the visitor, despite its attempt at seduction through images. If Ricciotti’s architecture — whether you love it or hate it — leaves no one indifferent, the exhibition doesn't really seem to reveal much on the thinking and modus operandi behind his work. Visitors to the Cité might have to go to the Louvre, or, better, take a train down to Marseille — this year’s European Capital of Culture — to see the MuCEM, in order to really experience Riciotti’s architecture. Léa Catherine Szacka

Through 8 September 2013
Ricciotti, Architecte
Cité de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine
1 Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, Paris

Notes:

1. Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London: Reaktion, 2012.

Ricciotti, architect

The French architect's retrospective at the Cité de l’Architecture is all about images. The only exception are Ricciotti’s prototypes or “testimonies to the memory of the work”: impressive, instructive and intriguing.

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