Rudy Ricciotti
| Rudy Ricciotti (*1952)
In the 1980s, engineer and architect Rudy Ricciotti practised a hedonistic architecture, involving the pleasure of form and space. Then, with the advent of the 1990s, he veered away from the formal deadlocks of neo-modernism. From then on his work has been informed by a critical radicalness which would find early expression in the Vitrolles Stadium (1994). This suburban bunker, made of dark concrete, rises up in the midst of bauxite slagheaps, redefining a rubbish tip. Land Art practitioner Robert Smithson employed the concept of "ruins in reverse" for this post-industrial nature. Similarly, architecture and landscape are entropic in Vitrolles, at once vitalist and fractured in their semantic itinerary. The rough expressiveness of this monolith—at once isolated block and mineral concretion—is at the same time a paradox. Its façade is as if smithereened by countless red motifs, which glow day and night. The massive imposition of the building is hollowed out within, in the form of fiercely extruded walls. The backwashes of light dwindle into wires which streak the space with their kinetic vibrations. Shape and shapelessness, opaqueness and holes, compactness and upheavals, darkness of the primitive mass and telescoped lights, all refer, in their harsh alchemy of opposites, to the poetics of the Sublime and to the spatial constructs of Suprematism, where matter and sign, and obscurity and lightness are one. Everything contributes here to foil the unitary understanding of the building. Architecture is, from the outset, a heterogeneous and paradoxical sign. Form is not irreducible and implacable, beauty and ugliness are not end purposes, but operational processes which must give on to hybrid fields of appropriation of the real, culminating in an architecture that Ricciotti describes as "impure". Architecture as artefact, a conflagration of possibles, extracted from the composite fabric of the real and from the make-believe fabric of artistic creation. The Apollonian and the Dionysiac, the minimal and the expressive all merge together in the transgressive territorial cut-out represented by the Villa Lyprendi (Toulon), a window stretched horizontally over 115 feet (35 m), like a slash of transparency in the surrounding landscape. The eye often only looks out onto the outside through the cracks laminating the space (College 600, St. Ouen, 1997 ; EDF Houses, 1999), as if to shut out any underground viewpoint on the world. This fault architecture, involving the obliqueness of the sign, a resistance to pigeonholed divisions of space, and a refusal of mind-boggling hierarchies, which advocates the multiplicity of meaning of both artifice and falseness (dead palm tree and Vitrolles blue, or poppy field at St. Ouen), is thus an architecture of the availability of meaning. As a contemporary art lover and collector, Ricciotti espouses an aesthetics of poverty, vulgarity and low-tech, as energy-giving material. The conceptual paths that Ricciotti explores come across in a tension between optimism and negativity. The complexity of the real—the cross-fertilization of cultures, and the mixedness of word fields and social behaviour patterns—is part and parcel of his conception of architecture. Rudy Ricciotti's architecture, which is fictional, narrative and disruptive, triggers incoherence, while at the same time drawing its critical operational quality from a questioning of art.
Marie-Ange Brayer
