Les Terrasses du Port

This guide to Les Terrasses du Port in Marseille traces architect Michel Petuaud-Letang's brief to design a shopping center that reads as an upturned ocean liner facing the sea, on a stretch of dock kept off-limits to the public for decades. It follows the roughly forty-five-month build beside a working ferry terminal that still sends about two million passengers a year toward Corsica and Sardinia, on a budget near one hundred seventy-eight million euros. Notice the terrace's glass and steel opening the whole seaward face toward the Mediterranean as you walk it.