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Crafting Luxury with ‘More-ish’ Qualities at the YSL Museum: An Organic Approach

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Sustainable Luxury and Craftsmanship

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Abstract

Today, what is organic within architecture enables local craftspeople to acquire new expertise. Studio KO’s Yves Saint Laurent Museum (2017) in Marrakesh, Morocco, is imperative for understanding the relation between sustainable luxury and local craftsmanship. The construction fortifies fashion with the environment as well as local brickwork traditions. For the architects, horizontal layers of textured brickwork resemble a textile weave and become a constructed cultural entity. This chapter traces the ‘more-ish’ qualities, defined herein as causing one’s impulse to create handsome foci (as opposed to the Moorish, which is culturally based), inherent in the YSL Museum from an art-architectural perspective within the sustainable luxury context. It explores the display of the camouflaged Berber (or Amazigh) textile within the building’s facades and interprets its ‘more-ish’ qualities of luxury through its spaces. Analysing Howard Risatti’s ‘theory of craft’ [42] and Richard Sennett’s idea of craft ‘as an enduring, basic human impulse’ [21], this chapter explains why the bricks-and-mortar structure and zellige (hand-made) tiles have literally and metaphorically regained value through craftsmanship in the luxury sector. It discusses how traditional brick-laying techniques and their unexpected connections have transformed the desert built environment and speculates why these changes inform adaptive reuse practice as a ‘more-ish’ organic approach. In this respect, in discussing the brickmaking as a form of crafting luxury the process has cultivated a bonding or ‘tuning-in’ tactic, important in understanding sustainable Moroccan culture.

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Acknowledgements

In Morocco, I thank Faycal Tiaiba from Studio KO Marrakech Office for his conversation on the Yves Saint Laurent Museum project and The Arts of Fashion Foundation for the opportunity to work within the YSL Museum’s conference room as well as meeting Noureddine Amir at his atelier and residence.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Design and the Built Environment, Curtin University, Perth, Australia

    Annette Condello

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  1. Annette Condello
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Correspondence to Annette Condello .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Studies on Sustainable Luxury, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Miguel Ángel Gardetti

  2. Luxury and Fashion Management, SKEMA Business School, Nice, France

    Ivan Coste-Manière

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Condello, A. (2020). Crafting Luxury with ‘More-ish’ Qualities at the YSL Museum: An Organic Approach. In: Gardetti, M., Coste-Manière, I. (eds) Sustainable Luxury and Craftsmanship. Environmental Footprints and Eco-design of Products and Processes. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3769-1_7

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