The Vitrolles Stadium is a 5,000-seat performance and sports hall located in Vitrolles in the Bouches-du-Rhône. The Festival d'Aix-en-Provence recovered the Stadium of Vitrolles as a concert hall, with a performance of Mahler 's Second Symphony in July 2022.

The Vitrolles Stadium is now frozen in dust. It is both there without being there. Some remember a concert, a unique experience, others admire it for its architecture, and others see in it the history of a local culture. But the strongest thing is that many of us do not know him. Neither its history, nor its function, nor its architect.

In the 90s, the city of Vitrolles decided to equip itself with multifunctional equipment accessible to all and for all. With a limited budget and wishing for an interesting image for its city, the municipality chose the project of the Fougerolle-Ricciotti team which ensured the design and the realization of the project.

The Vitrolles Stadium, designed in 1990 by Rudy Ricciotti, is a relevant project response from an economic, political, programmatic, cultural and contextual point of view. It is undoubtedly the building that was needed on this site, a former bauxite dump. It is an act of aesthetic violence and iconographic resistance.

The conception and the realization of the project are a real work in the mass which ensures that the nothing is and exists, in a certain way the Stadium is very optimistic because it produces a reconciliation with the abandoned territory. The Stadium is a completely positive message. The way of thinking about the project uses devices in the service of a narration, a staging, an onirism. Through its constructive aspect, the Stadium is in a quest for truth of an extreme sophistication which offers a radicality.

The clearly visible black concrete structure is part of a constructive archaism. There is only skin and bones in a project where what is built and what is seen is only primary structure. The Stadium project gives birth to a monumental, strong and brutal building that swallows everything in its path. A project where the architecture even captures its site. A project where the radicality claimed in fact supports its realization.