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CULTURE architecture
Three years ago, Pierre Bergé, Yves Saint Laurent’s longtime partner in business and in life, contacted architects Olivier Marty and Karl Fournier, also partners in business and life, and asked them to design a museum in Marrakech that would house Saint Laurent’s legacy and, in no small part, his own. His directive was deceptively straightforward: “It’s simple—I want something strong, Moroccan, contemporary, and, above all, absolutely uncompromising.” Oh, is that it?
For Bergé, who had never commissioned a building from scratch, to award the job flat out was a stunning leap of faith, though he already knew Marty and Fournier well. The architects had met him years before through Bergé’s tight-knit circle of friends in Morocco, where the duo’s…
