Marseille, France’s gritty second city, was much in the news last September when President Macron spent an unprecedented three days there, on a mission to sort out the enormous problems facing this ancient port. Among them is the state of Marseille’s schools, many of which are underfunded and literally falling down. At the root of the decline is late 20th-century deindustrialization, which saw the city lose 50,000 jobs and 150,000 inhabitants in just 20 years. The ongoing regeneration of the half-abandoned port area—first launched in 1995 and baptized Euroméditerranée—focuses on 1,186 acres of land in and around the Arenc and La Joliette neighborhoods. It now includes a new school complex for the Groupe Scolaire Antoine de Ruffi, located in the shadow of Zaha Hadid’s 2011 CMA-CGM headquarters (an emblematic Euroméditerranée project right on the waterfront) that was built to serve a rapidly evolving district.
An idea of the sweeping changes is clear from looking at the school’s immediate neighbors: to the south, a 1930s social-housing block; to the east, a 1910s soap factory, behind which are giant concrete grain silos; to the north, on a party wall plot, an 18-story apartment building currently under construction; and, to the west, a vast empty lot earmarked for an international school. “It’s rather a problem area,” says Adrian Garcin, principal of Tautem, lead architect on the project. “Cross the road, and you’re in another world. Moreover, we knew we were going to have to exist next to dense, imposing projects. Given the context, we felt the school should be a landmark for the neighborhood, a reference point for its inhabitants.”
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