Crafting Luxury with ‘More-ish’ Qualities …
147
quality was established well-before Delacroix—with Ibn Battuta’s influence when
he traded with China in the fourteenth century, especially in procuring handcrafted
silks and ‘tea-coins’, rather than tea-bricks.
Other than brews and foodstuffs, something ‘more-ish’ is highly attractive, a
quality that satisfies something for someone as well as a plead that urges someone
to keep going back for more. Now, this chapter will turn to demonstrate the way that
ideas relating to crafted luxury and sustainability, especially the brickwork patterns,
are worked within Studio KO’s Yves Saint Laurent Museum as a mechanism of
more-ish qualities that explicate the trickery of the organic, by the camouflage of
animal pelts made into permanent brick-pelts.
5 Brick-Trickery Craftwork at the Yves Saint Laurent
Museum, an Organic Approach
Time-shifting within the contemporary architectural practice and the incorporation
of traditional or forgotten craftsmanship has re-emerged through the making marble
models was done in the Middle Ages by the master masons. At the two months
conceptual stage of designing the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, which all-in-all took
two years to construct in reality, Studio KO commissioned Atelier Misto founder
Miza Mucciarelli from Italy to make a presentation model out of marble, reusing
red porphyry (Fig. 12). Traditionally, imperial porphyry (found in Egypt’s eastern
desert and that was used to build sarcophagi for Roman emperors) is perceived to be
a geologically unique rock, resembling the colour of purple blood. ‘Blood, is what
ties a soul to the earth, and it is also what produces and contains earthly memory’
[18, p. 15). Mucciarelli’s time to craft the model thus presents the intellectual efforts
of the architect as well as the imaginative reconstruction of excess luxury materials,
resembling a ‘haberdashery’ of elegant off-cuts.
Located on the edge of the Majorelle Garden, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum,
an austere but intricate brick-tomb with brick-pelts or facades for clothing, was
inspired by the colours of the Marrakech desert-the local brick palate of the city and
Amazigh culture. Created on behalf of the Majorelle Garden Foundation, the Yves
Saint Laurent museum was managed by Studio KO’s chief architect at the Marrakech
office, Faycal Tiaiba.
Yves Saint Laurent Museum (Fig. 13) comprises an exhibition space, a temporary exhibition hall, bookshop, the Pierre Berge auditorium (a flexible space), library,
conference room, café and restaurant and a fashion archive. The building plan is a
strong sequence of circles, squares and rectilinear spaces. Horizontal layers of textured brickwork resemble a textile weave and the floor plan adapts and curiously
represents Mohamed Chebba’s painting entitled Composition (1968) (Fig. 14). The
museum basement according to Director of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Bjorn
Dahlstrom ‘comprises a state-of-the-art conservation department whereby hundreds
of garments and accessories are stored with optimal conservation conditions in mind
147
quality was established well-before Delacroix—with Ibn Battuta’s influence when
he traded with China in the fourteenth century, especially in procuring handcrafted
silks and ‘tea-coins’, rather than tea-bricks.
Other than brews and foodstuffs, something ‘more-ish’ is highly attractive, a
quality that satisfies something for someone as well as a plead that urges someone
to keep going back for more. Now, this chapter will turn to demonstrate the way that
ideas relating to crafted luxury and sustainability, especially the brickwork patterns,
are worked within Studio KO’s Yves Saint Laurent Museum as a mechanism of
more-ish qualities that explicate the trickery of the organic, by the camouflage of
animal pelts made into permanent brick-pelts.
5 Brick-Trickery Craftwork at the Yves Saint Laurent
Museum, an Organic Approach
Time-shifting within the contemporary architectural practice and the incorporation
of traditional or forgotten craftsmanship has re-emerged through the making marble
models was done in the Middle Ages by the master masons. At the two months
conceptual stage of designing the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, which all-in-all took
two years to construct in reality, Studio KO commissioned Atelier Misto founder
Miza Mucciarelli from Italy to make a presentation model out of marble, reusing
red porphyry (Fig. 12). Traditionally, imperial porphyry (found in Egypt’s eastern
desert and that was used to build sarcophagi for Roman emperors) is perceived to be
a geologically unique rock, resembling the colour of purple blood. ‘Blood, is what
ties a soul to the earth, and it is also what produces and contains earthly memory’
[18, p. 15). Mucciarelli’s time to craft the model thus presents the intellectual efforts
of the architect as well as the imaginative reconstruction of excess luxury materials,
resembling a ‘haberdashery’ of elegant off-cuts.
Located on the edge of the Majorelle Garden, the Yves Saint Laurent Museum,
an austere but intricate brick-tomb with brick-pelts or facades for clothing, was
inspired by the colours of the Marrakech desert-the local brick palate of the city and
Amazigh culture. Created on behalf of the Majorelle Garden Foundation, the Yves
Saint Laurent museum was managed by Studio KO’s chief architect at the Marrakech
office, Faycal Tiaiba.
Yves Saint Laurent Museum (Fig. 13) comprises an exhibition space, a temporary exhibition hall, bookshop, the Pierre Berge auditorium (a flexible space), library,
conference room, café and restaurant and a fashion archive. The building plan is a
strong sequence of circles, squares and rectilinear spaces. Horizontal layers of textured brickwork resemble a textile weave and the floor plan adapts and curiously
represents Mohamed Chebba’s painting entitled Composition (1968) (Fig. 14). The
museum basement according to Director of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Bjorn
Dahlstrom ‘comprises a state-of-the-art conservation department whereby hundreds
of garments and accessories are stored with optimal conservation conditions in mind