For the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games (JP), in Paris, Friday July 26, Jacques Rougerie will be in the front row. The barge where he lives with his wife Sophie, where he also set up his architectural agency more than thirty years ago, will remain moored at the port of the Champs-Elysées, at the foot of Place de la Concorde. With his colleagues, he will be on deck, glass of champagne in hand, to celebrate the event, in which they all took part.
Unhappy finalists in the competition for the Olympic aquatic center of Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint-Denis), they won, with the Marseille agency Roland Carta, that of the Marina de Marseille, where the French sailing team is is training for the Olympics.
“There is nothing ostentatious about the architecture of the building, he admits, as if apologizing. The town hall wanted something sober, integrated into the context… But it’s the kind of project that makes you proud. The goal, after the Games, is for young people from the northern neighborhoods to take ownership of the sea, to see the magical playground that it is. For an architect like me, who has devoted my life to the sea, when I had just bought a house in Marseille, it was inconceivable not to reach the top of the podium! »
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The years have not extinguished the flame of passion in the 78-year-old architect. His trajectory as a spoiled child of the baby boom will certainly have seen him evolve from an idealistic practice, driven by the desire to inhabit the seabed and colonize space, to a gravitational production anchored in concrete and in accordance with market rules. The pop aesthetic of its ships shaped like jellyfish or seahorses, its underwater bases straight out of a science fiction comic book and its other floating cities with the profile of sea monsters – which we can still see , until May 12, as part of the splendid exhibition “Living with the sea” dedicated to him at the Villa Noailles in Hyères (Var) –, certainly belongs to history today.
Although he managed to build a small fraction of everything he imagined in the 1970s, his production today focuses on swimming pools and centers dedicated to the sea – the Sea Pavilion in Osaka-Kobe , in Japan ; the Océanopolis in Brest; Nausicaa in Boulogne-sur-Mer (Pas-de-Calais)… –, holiday villages, even airports.
Explorer at heart
But Jacques Rougerie remains a “merian”, to use this neologism of his own, which designates those who feel better in the water than on dry land. His impeccably shaped helmet of white hair, the academician’s sword that he wears in his buttonhole, the rosette of the Legion of Honor that tickles his fancy don’t change anything: when he starts talking about the sea, his body tenses, stars light up in his eyes, he begins to vibrate.
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