It is a site where the stories mixed together. The Ruffi Sports Center is located in front of the St. Martin church. The building marks its territory and reflecting that in Marseilles, city has influenced by Latin culture, with the history to having together activity in sport. The viewer might be forgiven for dismissing this construction as a disused industrial warehouse. It is actually a sports complex, providing various facilities for the local community including basketball and handball courts, both indoor and outdoor, and 2 areas of marked terrain to play petanque, ready to use 24 hours a day.

The design is about transformation, materializes and synthesizes an evolution. It tries to critic and crystallizes the changing phase of the district: when the place is still a village, then turned into industrial era and last to contemporary condition which reconquest of the city and its territory. As a site filled with industrial carcasses, the Ruffi Sports Center is angled facing to the street of Ruffi and Melchior Guinot. The usage of pre-cast concrete slabs is an effort to response with the street.

The non-architectonic concrete is a result from an intersection of semi-industrial local culture with semi-cottage. The rough patchwork of various sizes and different grey hues resembling a skin with tended muscles. At first glance the patterning seems to be an incidental visual-effect, but there is something craft-like in this application of a readily available material more common to massive industrial construction. Austere metal doors, barely noticeable in the facades, enhance the sense of articulated design.

The roof is solid and heavy at ground and topped with “boxes of light”, defined by 3 off-kilter boxes, structured form glass casing, which shimmer by day and have a translucent glow by night. The clerestory effect of the roof allows the highly functional interior to be naturally lit whilst removing risk of glare that might interfere with the sports. The irregular lines of the roof boxes give variation to the basic, linear interior.

The external effect of the roof angles, combined with the casual crafting of the concrete, gives the Ruffi Sports Center an insouciant feel, a contrast to the more traditional architecture of the Eglise St Martin to the north. This new public space collects the memory of the district and it becomes carrying the symbolic system of industrial characteristic and the mysticism of Latin religious sportsman. Watching the Ruffi Sports Center is like watching cinema, which the object tells a new history, sharing enjoyments, matters, and pleasures.

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