Born in Kouba, Algeria, Ricciotti was 3 when his family moved to southern France, where he spent his childhood in a tiny village near Arles. After studying engineering in Geneva, he returned to Marseille in 1974 for a stint at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture and graduated in 1980. Awarded the Grand Prix National d’Architecture in 2006, he has received regular commissions ever since. He’s been awarded the Legion of Honor, the Order of Arts and Letters, and the National Order of Merit. And yet international prominence on a Gehryesque scale has eluded him.

One reason may be that his outlook remains resolutely southern French. He has an office in Bandol, along with a house he’s restoring in Cassis on a paradisiacal slab of coastal calanque. (On the side, Ricciotti also runs the small, eclectic publishing company Al Dante, which features photography, essays on architecture, and poetry, including a French translation of John Ashbery. He also collects rare books; his pride and joy is a volume by John Giorno.) The Marseille project was particularly appealing because, as he says, he feels a strong bond with the port because it is a simmering bouillabaisse of Mediterranean cultures.

But Ricciotti acknowledges that he’s paid a price for his independence. His disarming banter, truffled with jokes and neologisms, turns virulent when it comes to what he describes as the “pernicious ethics of cultural impoverishment.” His bête noire is Minimalism, a style he once referred to as “pornographic,” an aesthetic of “amnesia and laziness, for people who all dream of having the same chair in white polyester and molded plastic.”

Philippe Starck calls Ricciotti “a clairvoyant, untamable wild animal,” which he means as the highest form of praise. “Rudy Ricciotti invented explosive concrete,” Starck says. “In his subversive magician hands, inert concrete becomes a political weapon and a poetic pen.”

Ricciotti works with concrete, he says, “because of its durability. I’m all for an architecture that creates jobs and territoriality. Concrete is clean and it stays put.” And it can be unexpectedly lyrical. Take, for example, his Musée Jean Cocteau, opened in Menton last year: a white trapezoid whose outdoor walls resemble jagged white tentacles that hug the earth like a mythological creature.

For the Louvre project, however, Ricciotti and Bellini worked with glass and metal to create a glowing, undulating roof for the Islamic Arts department’s new pavilion. It is a veil-like structure, situated in the Visconti courtyard, that seems to hover above the ground like a silk handkerchief drifting in the breeze. For Ricciotti, it also evokes Montesquieu’s epistolary novel, “Persian Letters,” in which two traveling Persian noblemen marvel at the strange customs of Parisian life — a fitting reference for the collection the pavilion will house and, perhaps, for Ricciotti himself.

“I’m all for the ‘demuseumification’ of museums,” he says. “I want visitors to take in the landscape without being terrorized by the architecture.” He pauses, heaving a theatrical sigh. “Because my work is not about arrogance or affectation — it’s fragile, feminine, nourished by intuition, ambiguity . . . and a lot of anxiety.”