Rabat – As the year 2017 draws to its end, the Architectural Digest has chosen Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech among eleven most influential buildings of 2017, underlining that “the choice was not easy at all.”
Built next to the wonderful garden “Jardin Majorelle,” a property co-owned by Saint Laurent, where his ashes were scattered after his death in 2008, the museum hosts the work of the iconic French fashion designer, Yves Saint Laurent, and the Foundation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Paris collection.
Designed by the French architecture firm headed by Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier, the museum features a temporary exhibition space, a 130-seat auditorium, a bookshop, and a research library that will focus on literature, botany, Berber culture, poetry and history.
“We designed the building like one would cut fabric for a dress, by composing curves and lines, in the fashion of the working drawings, white traced on black paper that we discovered in the designer’s workshop and archives.
Its façades would be wrapped in a brick trim, like a drape, a throw, a cape,” the French architecture firm said.
The front of the building was built using terra-cotta bricks made locally in ovens powered by olive waste, with an attractive ochre color that resembles the color of Marrakech.
The Architectural Digest said that the earth-torched exterior seamlessly blends in with the surrounding desert landscape.
The list includes Chaoyang Park Plaza Beijing, Louvre Abu Dhabi, Lascaux IV in Montignac, France, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, South Africa, V&A Museum in London, Apple Park in Cupertino, California, Tianjin Binhai Library in Tianjin, China, LEGO House in Billund, Denmark, Maggie’s Center in London, and Beirut Terraces in Lebanon.
