Rudy Ricciotti, Architect/storyteller

Rudy Ricciotti, whose resume includes Angelin Preljocaj’s National Choreography Centre in Aixen- Provence, the restructuring of the Great Windmills for the Denis Diderot-Paris VII University, the Cocteau Museum in Menton, and Berlin’s Postdam Philharmonic, is currently working on Marseille’s MuCEM (Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations), the new architectural spaces of the Louvre’s Arts of Islam and the Jean-Bouin stadium in Paris. A self-styled reactionary and mannerist, this Marseille School of Architecture and Geneva School of Engineers graduate, winner of the 2006 National Grand Prize in Architecture, who loves to take up arms against the “pornography of neo-environmentalist rules”, is a student of the storytelling techniques of such film-makers as the Coen brothers, Pasolini or Coppola, able to mix several styles effortlessly. His agency, which bears his name and employs, which employs 28 collaborators, loves to push the technical envelope to design ever more complex bare concrete structures, starting with the famed Ductal© Peace footbridge over the Han in Seoul, in 1999.

© Olivier Metzger