Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech: Studio KO built a museum out of cloth, and left the colour to the garden

DESIGN TRAVEL · MARRAKECH

Reading time: 8 min

Building next to Jardin Majorelle is a harder brief than it looks. The garden is one of the most photographed places on earth and it is saturated with a single colour. Studio KO’s answer was to make the least colourful building in the neighbourhood: terracotta, terrazzo and concrete, no cobalt anywhere. The restraint is the whole design, and it is why the museum works.

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I first came to Jardin Majorelle in 2017, when the garden was the only reason to make the trip. I came back the following year, because by then there was a second one.

The Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech opened in October 2017, a short walk from the garden gate, and it is one of only two permanent museums in the world devoted to Yves Saint Laurent and the collection he built with Pierre Bergé. The other opened in Paris in the same month, in the couture house’s own former headquarters on avenue Marceau. One museum stands where the work was made. This one stands where he went to think.

It is a 4,000 square metre building by Studio KO, and the interesting thing about it is not what it contains. It is what it refuses to do.

Next door to the bluest place in Morocco, they built something with no colour at all

Consider the site problem honestly, because it is the key to everything that follows.

Jardin Majorelle is organised around Majorelle Blue, an intense cobalt applied to the villa, the pergolas, the pots and the paths, and used deliberately to make the planting in front of it read more vividly. It is one of the most recognisable colour environments anywhere, and it draws well over 700,000 visitors a year largely on the strength of it.

Put a new public building fifty metres away and you have two options. Compete with the blue, or decline to.

Studio KO declined. The museum is built from terracotta brick, earth-coloured terrazzo and concrete, and there is effectively no colour in it at all. Every surface sits within a narrow band of ochre, sand, clay and dust, which is to say the colour range of Marrakech itself before anybody painted anything.

That is a considerable act of discipline, and it is what makes the two work as a pair rather than as rivals. The garden supplies the colour. The museum supplies the texture. Walk from one to the other and you get a genuine change of register rather than a second helping of the same thing.

The facade is a textile

With colour taken off the table, the building has to do its work through surface, and this is where Studio KO’s idea is at its best.

The terracotta brick is laid so that the elevation reads as the warp and weft of woven fabric. Bricks project and recede in a repeating pattern, so the wall gathers shadow in a fine grid that shifts as the sun moves. From across the street it is a solid mass. From ten metres it resolves into a weave. From arm’s length you can see it is simply brick, laid with unusual care.

It is worth naming what that achieves. A building for a couturier could easily have gestured at fashion through printed graphics, silhouettes or a display of frocks behind glass. Studio KO instead took the underlying structure of the material Saint Laurent worked in, the interlacing of threads at right angles, and built it at the scale of a wall. The reference is not to what he made. It is to what he made it from.

Set against the brick are smooth volumes of earthen terrazzo, curved and angular in turn, which the architects have related to the succession of delicate and bold forms that ran through Saint Laurent’s own work.

Inside is the lining

Then you go in, and the argument completes itself in one move.

The entrance hall is finished in smooth white, deliberately evoking the velvety lining of a couture jacket, and around the curved lobby wall runs monochrome stained glass in a Moroccan idiom. A circular open-air courtyard carries the house’s logo on a concrete wall.

Rough outside, smooth within. That is exactly how a well-made garment is constructed: a worked, textured, structural exterior, and a lining chosen for how it feels against the body. Building a museum for a couturier on that single principle is one of the most elegant pieces of thinking in recent North African architecture, and it is complete enough that once you have seen it you cannot unsee it.

The stained glass is the detail I would send people to look at. It is monochrome, so it does not introduce colour, but it fractures the light in the same way the brick fractures the shadow outside. The building is consistent even in the places where it could easily have relaxed.

What is actually in it

The programme is substantial and it goes well beyond a display of dresses.

There are two permanent exhibitions. One is devoted to Yves Saint Laurent, presented in a 400 square metre gallery holding around fifty couture pieces shown in rotation from a far larger archive. The second is devoted to Jacques Majorelle, the painter who made the garden next door, which is a generous piece of curating: the museum bearing one man’s name gives permanent space to another.

Alongside them sit a temporary exhibition space, a research library of more than 6,000 volumes, a 130-seat auditorium lined in oak, a conservation laboratory, a bookshop and a 75-seat café with a terrace.

The library and the conservation lab are the parts that tell you what this institution is for. A museum with a working archive and a laboratory is not a visitor attraction with a collection attached, it is a research body that happens to be open to the public.

The man who commissioned it did not see it open

There is a detail about the timing of all this that is worth knowing before you go.

The museum was created by the Fondation Jardin Majorelle, the body Pierre Bergé established to hold the garden and its collections, and Bergé drove the project personally. He had bought the garden with Saint Laurent in 1980, kept it after Saint Laurent’s death in 2008, and spent his last years building two museums for him at once, in Paris and in Marrakech.

He died on 8 September 2017, a few weeks before the Marrakech building opened its doors in October, and shortly before the Paris one followed.

Knowing that changes how the place reads. This is not a foundation commemorating a designer at a comfortable distance. It is the last project of the person who spent fifty years as his partner and his publisher, finished without him, in the city the two of them chose. The permanent gallery given over to Jacques Majorelle makes more sense in that light too: it is the act of somebody thinking about the whole site and its history rather than about a single name above a door.

Terracotta is also the practical answer

One more thing about the brick, because it is easy to read the weave as purely poetic.

Marrakech is hot and dry, with a large swing between day and night temperatures for much of the year. Fired earth is close to the ideal material for that: it has real thermal mass, so it absorbs heat slowly through the day and releases it after dark, and it is made from the ground the building stands on rather than shipped in.

The projecting brick pattern then adds a second function. Every brick that steps proud of the wall casts a shadow on the ones below it, so the elevation is partly self-shading, and the amount of direct sun striking the surface is reduced simply by the geometry of the bond. The weave is a climate device that happens to look like cloth, which is the most satisfying kind of design decision there is: one move, two justifications, neither of them decorative.

Who Studio KO are

Studio KO is the French practice founded by Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier, working between Paris and Marrakech, with a long body of work in Morocco behind them.

That matters here. The pair have described the commission as bringing together two worlds they know well and hold dear, fashion and Morocco, and the building shows the benefit of that familiarity in the least glamorous way possible: the brick. Getting a terracotta weave to work at this scale, in this climate, with local trades, is not a thing a practice arrives at from outside. It is the product of having built there before.

The museum is now their best-known building, and it did something useful for the country’s architectural profile: it demonstrated that a contemporary Moroccan building could be internationally significant without either importing a foreign idiom or reproducing a traditional one.

How the two sit together

The most common way to do this visit is the garden, then out. It is the wrong way round, or at least it is half a visit.

Take the garden first, in the morning, when the blue is still being lit from a low angle. Then walk to the museum, which is a few minutes away, and let the change of temperature and colour do its work. Coming out of a saturated cobalt garden into a building made entirely of earth is a designed transition even though no one designed it as one.

Allow half a day for all of it, including the Berber Museum inside the garden’s Cubist villa, which holds around six hundred objects of Amazigh culture and takes a separate ticket. The museum also has its own ticket, separate again.

If you can only do two of the three, do the garden and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent. The design argument runs between those two, and one without the other is an incomplete sentence.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easiest building to design next to something famous is a quiet one, and the hardest is a quiet one that is still worth crossing a city for.

Studio KO managed the second. They gave up colour entirely on a site where colour is the main event, and then spent everything they had saved on a single idea about surface: a wall that behaves like woven cloth on the outside and like a jacket lining on the inside. It is one argument, made twice, in two materials, and it holds from the far side of the street down to the width of a brick.

I came back for it a year after first seeing the garden, and the thing I did not expect is how much it improved the garden. Jardin Majorelle used to be a beautiful place you photographed. With the museum next to it, it became half of a conversation.