The school in Manosque, where teaching is partly in French and partly in one of the foreign languages, including English, Chinese, Russian, Hindi and German, is intended for the children of foreign specialists working on the construction of the ITER International Experimental Thermonuclear Reactor in the nearby Cadarache. The reactor will be launched in 2019, but even then the school will remain necessary: the reactor project is funded and implemented not only by the EU, but by Japan, China, Russia, India and other countries, so there will always be a lot of foreign employees there.
At the same time, local authorities believe that 50% of students (children from 3 to 18 years old are united in the school) will be local residents. This position was reflected in the architecture: it is emphatically “primitivized” and tied to the ground (there is only one floor in the building, although its level rises and falls following the landscape). Ricciotti and his partner in this project, the Marseille architect Jean-Michel Battesti, started from the archetypal combination of support and beam: the building is surrounded by a gallery of powerful concrete supports; the courtyards are also surrounded by "porticoes", but their ceilings are supported by thinner, tree-like "columns". This solution creates the necessary shaded spaces and protects the building from overheating in the dry and hot climate of Provence; the same role is played by landscaping - including on the roof of the school. It should also be noted that, with the exception of concrete supports, wood and glass predominate in the building.
Ricciotti solemnly named his multicolumn edifice "the temple of knowledge"; however, one cannot fail to note an element of self-citation in the project: the architect proposed a similar solution for the Jean Cocteau Museum currently under construction on the Cote d'Azur.
