Les Docks Village

This guide to Les Docks Village in Marseille starts with a fact easy to miss behind the boutiques: the whole structure was built without a single piece of wood, after engineer Gustave Desplaces banned timber from his 1850s warehouse design to guard against dockside fires. It follows how he raised one of Europe's largest cast-iron-and-brick warehouse complexes for the grain and cotton trade, and the hidden calendar he built into its proportions, days, weeks, and seasons, encoded in its doors, floors, and courtyards. It traces the building's decades as a working port warehouse before it sat mostly unseen by anyone outside the docks.