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The Contextualizer

By Arthur Lubow

• April 6, 2008

EVERY JEAN NOUVEL BUILDING tells a story. Typically, architects begin the design process with a sketch pad or scale models, but Nouvel starts with an idea he can express in words. “Everyone is a product of his epoch,” he told me recently. “For me, I was born in France after the war; I was in the milieu of Structuralist thinkers. If I don’t have a good analysis of something, I am lost.” Once Nouvel examines his given conditions and decides that the best architectural solution is, say, a skyscraper without visible base and summit, or a mechanized geometric facade that casts filigreed shadows, he can get going. But to this cerebral process he appends a counterweight: the sensuous love of the material components of a building. “What I like is the poétique of the situation,” he said, in Gallically accented English. “I am a hedonist, and I want to give pleasure to other people.” That avowal of hedonism gained credibility from the surroundings in which it was made: Le Duc, arguably the best seafood restaurant in Paris, where the waiter knew without instruction to bring Nouvel’s standard order of marinated raw fish followed by poached lobster dressed with olive oil.

Nouvel treats favorite restaurants as his office annexes, where he can develop his creative ideas in stereotypically French fashion — over long, wide-ranging discussions, lubricated by excellent food and wine. From this unchanging routine he achieves a wild variety of results. Most visitors to Paris would probably be surprised to learn that a single architect is responsible for the Fondation Cartier, a light-flooded, rectangular glass building in the Montparnasse district that is sandwiched elegantly between two huge glass screens, and the Musée du Quai Branly, a hodgepodge of vividly colored components with a spooky, tenebrous exhibition hall that veers perilously close to kitsch. “Of course, you can find a lot of contradictions between all my buildings,” Nouvel told me. “I have no global reasons; I have particular reasons.” Other critically praised architectural firms, like Herzog & de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture, make similar claims. Nouvel’s projects, however, lack not only a recurring formal vocabulary but even a readily apparent common sensibility.

Nouvel is, at 62, a bulky man with an enormous shaved head, an intense gaze, bushy black eyebrows and an all-black wardrobe that he often complements with a broad-brimmed black hat. He makes an unmistakable impression, yet despite his powerful personality, he is exceptionally good at allowing a building to take on a personality of its own. With some of his projects, that personality is coolly and irresistibly seductive, and with others, it is brassy, even cheesy.

Last week, Nouvel was named the winner of his profession’s highest honor, the Pritzker Architecture Prize. As his close friend the architect Frank Gehry told me last month, Nouvel was “long overdue” to win it, but the inconsistency of his work got in the way. “He’s precarious,” explained Gehry, who was on the awards jury until last year. “He tries things, and not everything works. There’s a mixture of things that are extraordinary, things that are experiments, things that don’t come off aesthetically. But Jean is willing to jump in and take on things and try. That’s a great quality.”

Even before receiving the Pritzker, Nouvel in recent years has garnered the recognition that architects most covet — prestigious and challenging commissions all over the world. He is doing a concert hall in Paris and another in Copenhagen; in the Middle East, he is designing the Louvre Abu Dhabi and an annex to the Qatar National Museum. In New York City alone, his firm has built a stylish residential condominium in SoHo; broken ground on another innovative condo tower with a tessellated glass curtain wall in West Chelsea; and won the commission to construct what could become a city landmark, a 75-story Midtown skyscraper next to the Museum of Modern Art. The twisting, angular MoMA tower, says Nouvel’s business partner, Michel Pelissié, is “the most important project for him now.” Nouvel was so eager to land the deal that he urged Pelissié not to negotiate too hard on fees with the developer.

Nouvel’s next-to-MoMA scheme looks like no other high-rise in the city, but he told me, “It is a kind of archetype of what can be a skyscraper in New York.” He sees the existing architecture of a city as a record of how previous builders responded to the unique geographical and historical conditions of that place; therefore he argues that rigorous analysis, not dumb replication, is the way to design a new structure that is truly contextual. “Every architecture is an opportunity to create what I call the missing pieces of the puzzle,” he explained. “To find how you can create more poetry with the place where you are and the program you have. You research what will be the most emotional, the most perfect, the most natural.” The purpose of all the thinking, he says, is to arrive at a result that makes gut sense.

F ollowing a working lunch in early January, Nouvel strolled — he does not like to walk fast — to the Quai Branly, to meet representatives of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, who were in Paris to interview him and look at some of his buildings. They were in the midst of a search to select the architect of a new opera house and cultural center in Athens. Before entering the museum, Nouvel pointed out to me the particularities of the Branly site, which extends from the boulevard along the Seine to a quietly affluent residential block. Nouvel erected a glass wall (on the high-traffic river side) to mark the line of the streetscape and placed his buildings in a garden behind it. When you look through the glass wall from the street, the reflections of the trees on the boulevard mingle with the blurred images of the trees in the garden within, so it is difficult to say which is where. This is what Nouvel calls a “game” — the French word “jeu” can also refer to the play of light on a surface, a pun or a witticism, all of which seem appropriate to the architectural games he loves.

The Musée du Quai Branly houses the national collections of African, Oceanic and Native American art that were formerly displayed in anthropological museums, mainly in the Musée de l’Homme and the Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens. Even more than the challenge of inserting his architecture into an awkward urban site, the task of creating a suitable home for these cultural artifacts fascinated Nouvel. He resolved to exhibit them in settings that recalled their native environments. “It’s not an Occidental building,” he told me. “For me it is a world done with colors and shapes linked to an interpretation of Africa and Oceanic and American culture.” His solution seems to have delighted the general public, but it has outraged many anthropologists and museologists who mourn the loss of a cleaner, clinical display.

To reach the permanent collection, you must ascend a white ramp that coils around a cylindrical showcase of musical instruments. At the end of the ramp, the light dims, the ceiling lowers and the white walls and floor yield to dark red and brown surfaces. Voilà! You have left Europe behind.

A half-dozen middle-aged white men from the Niarchos Foundation were waiting for Nouvel just beyond the frontier. He greeted them in English and started his spiel. “For me it was very important to create a territory,” he said.

“Some critics say it is like a Disney museum. But I do not think it is the right attitude to show this art on white walls.” To evoke the religious emotion that should, in his view, suffuse the museum’s objects, he darkened the surroundings. “That was also very polemical, because people in Europe have the habit of white walls with a lot of light,” he explained. “So here every piece of art is done with the exact lighting that you need to see it. That is not what people are expecting.” His firm designed bespoke installations for 4,000 objects, working to conceal the light sources and to make the showcases as invisible as possible. (Indeed, wherever he could, Nouvel eliminated the vitrines and exhibited the objects out in the open.) He also grouped pieces in evocative ways. Standing between a big glass case of funerary idols and a smaller one of ritual objects, he pointed out how the reflections of the idols flickered on the glass of the opposite vitrine. “It’s a game with the spirits of the dead people, so you see the reflections like ghosts,” he said.

Night was falling as Nouvel, a few of his colleagues and the Greek visitors rode to the Fondation Cartier. Completed in 1994, this glass-and-steel temple to haute bourgeois good taste is a recognized masterpiece of 20th-century architecture. In many of its features, it prefigures the Branly: a glass wall at the height of the neighboring buildings, to separate the complex from the sidewalk and maintain the continuity of the streetscape; a building set back in a garden; and an elaborate play of the reflections of trees on glass. Yet the Fondation Cartier comes across like a slim woman in a black dress and pearls, while the Quai Branly is a guy with a diamond-studded tooth, duded up in a yellow shirt and orange plaid suit for a night out in Lagos or Port-au-Prince. At the Fondation Cartier, I mentioned to Nouvel how surprising it was that the architect of this modernist classic would design the Branly. “I never imagined I could do a building like Branly,” he replied. “But with a question like Branly, you have to have a building like Branly.”

NOUVEL INHERITED HIS LOVE of gathering knowledge from his parents, who were high-school teachers in the small town of Sarlat in the Périgord in southwestern France. (They still live there in retirement.) His father taught history and geography — the subjects that would become the two governing vectors of Nouvel’s architecture. Nouvel wanted to be a painter, but his parents insisted that he would never earn a living and urged him to be a mathematician or scientist instead. “I tried to find another way,” he told me. “I said, ‘Maybe I can do architecture.”’ After a year of study, he failed the entry examination for architecture school in Bordeaux, which turned out to be a blessing. When he took the test again in Paris the following year, he came in first. That distinction would enable him while still a student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts to obtain a position as assistant to Claude Parent and Paul Virilio, an architect and a cultural theorist, respectively, whose experimental architecture firm deeply influenced his outlook. (To reinforce the presence of critical thinking at the Ateliers Jean Nouvel, he keeps an in-house pundit on retainer.)

Nouvel openly disdained the Beaux-Arts teaching method, which valued the drawing of beautiful details over research and critique. Asked to submit a design for a children’s library as his thesis presentation, he handed in a written analysis of the drawings that children in different regions of France came up with when asked what a library looks like. (His thesis was rejected.) Required to conduct a study of towers, he rebutted the expectation that he would review skyscrapers of the International Style and researched mobile towers that in the Middle Ages were used to attack castles. (Also rejected.) The student protests and strikes of 1968 interrupted his education. Before his eventual graduation in 1971, he began working at Parent’s behest as a project manager — even though, he says, “I knew nothing, and the construction manager understood I knew nothing.” He learned quickly, however, and his ambition grew commensurately, perhaps too rapidly to suit his mentors. When he told Parent that he was designing a house for a friend in southwestern France, the older architect encouraged him to go out on his own, promising him small referrals.

I n his earliest buildings, Nouvel gave material expression to critical ideas. One notable example is the Dick House: after local codes required him to alter his original design, he constructed the house in two shades of brick — brown for the parts that he was permitted to build to plan, red for the amendations. The Dick House was realized, but many of his early projects were not. Still, they added to his growing reputation among architects.

His international breakthrough came with the Institut du Monde Arabe, a tour de force that opened in 1987. Wedged along the Seine, between Paris’s medieval kernel of the Île Saint-Louis to the north and the brutally modern campus of Jussieu university to the south, the Institut presents two very different facades. On the north, Nouvel aligned it precisely with the towers of the Notre Dame Cathedral, and using a newly available material, fritted glass, he etched in baked white ceramic a computer-generated image of the skyline across the river.

What captured the popular imagination, however, was the south facade, where Nouvel devised a sophisticated technological rendition of the moucharabieh, or latticed screens of Moorish patios and balconies. “The vocation of the building was to talk about Arab culture,” he told me. “If it is a homage, then it has to use the two main aspects of Arab architecture, geometry and light. But in Arab countries there are only sunny days. In Paris, more than half the days are cloudy. I need glass and insulation, because it gets cold and rainy, and I imagine an adjustment of the geometry to get the right light.” He invented a system of diaphragms like those that regulate the opening of a camera shutter. Controlled by a computer according to the external temperature and brightness, they would admit 30 percent of the available light when fully open and 9 percent when closed, “to have always the right intensity of light inside and to have the right solar protection,” he said. “But it was also to create a feeling of preciousness. A moucharabieh in wood or marble is very precious. You have to find the same feeling. If you don’t, you have something like Disney.” By arranging the aluminum diaphragms in a geometric pattern and covering them with glass, he gave the building the aura of an expensive, finely calibrated watch. In the end, the system was so successful that it defeated itself. To produce within the building the emotionally powerful effect of light and shadow that the architect desired, the motorized diaphragm openings rarely needed to change. But tourists wanted to see a demonstration; to Nouvel’s deep irritation, the authorities mandated that the computer controls be overriden so that the diaphragms open and close every hour. With each new presidential administration, Nouvel has petitioned to restore his scheme, so far without success.

The building was also weakened by cost-cutting measures, including the elimination of a fabulous-sounding feature, a fountain in which water would bubble up and down from a glass-covered tank that contained mercury swirling in arabesques in the water — an allusion to a passage in the “Arabian Nights” (unearthed by the in-house thinker of that period) on mercury shimmering under the moon. Notwithstanding the compromises, the building remains a revered work of the ’80s, utilizing the technical resources that were in vogue at the time but hiding most of the gadgetry. “Since the ’70s I have said, to show the beautiful beam is not interesting,” Nouvel told me. “What is interesting is when an engineer cannot imagine how the building is done. You show only the result, not how you arrive at the result.”

The year after the Institut opened, Nouvel brought in a partner, Emmanuel Cattani, who had political contacts and experience in building factories. The firm grew to more than 100 people, completing such major projects as a conference center in Tours, a transformation of the opera house in Lyon and the Fondation Cartier. Its most ambitious endeavor was a skyscraper that Nouvel (adapting a term from the artist Brancusi) called the “tour sans fins,” or endless tower. Conceived as a kind of minaret alongside the squat, monumental Grande Arche de La Défense, the endless tower has taken on some of the mystique of Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Friedrichstrasse glass skyscraper of 1921. To obscure its lower end, the tower was designed to sit within a crater. Its facade, appearing to vanish in the sky, changed as it rose, from charcoal-colored granite to paler stone, then to aluminum and finally to glass that became increasingly reflective, all to enhance the illusion of dematerialization. It would have been the world’s thinnest skyscraper, rising almost 1,400 feet from a base 138 feet in diameter.

Nouvel has gone on to use the cylindrical shape of the endless tower in subsequently built projects: the Agbar Tower in Barcelona and the Doha High-Rise Office Building in Qatar. All three skyscrapers use a system of peripheral load-bearing beams to maximize the floor space. But Nouvel arrived at the same solution through different routes. The Agbar Tower is based on the catenary curve, employed by Barcelona’s most famous architect, Antonio Gaudí. And Gaudí himself, in using the parabola formed by a hanging chain, was referring to the extraordinary shapes of the rock pinnacles of nearby Montserrat, whittled over eons by the wind. Such deep contextualism captivates Nouvel. Agbar, a concrete structure, further alludes to Gaudí in the panels of red and blue glass in its outer skin, which recall the broken colored tiles of Modernismo decoration. In contrast to the Barcelona tower, Doha employs an intricate aluminum mesh sunscreen that, like the Institut du Monde Arabe, is inspired by the moucharabieh. In Barcelona the main challenge was baffling the wind; in Doha it was to deflect the sun. But in the end, both are phallic forms (inspired in the case of Doha by a dome, not a catenary curve) with gaudy sheaths — representing what Gehry refers to as “a French aestheticism, and it’s not only Jean, that gets disco-ish with colors and lights and mirrors.”

The tour sans fins was much more restrained. Unfortunately, it was never constructed. The real estate slump of the early ’90s doomed the project. And with its demise, Nouvel’s firm, which had expanded to complete the tower, collapsed into bankruptcy. “There were a lot of people and not so many invoices,” Pelissié, Nouvel’s partner, told me. “In this period there were 150 people for a billing of five million euros. Now we have 175 people for a billing of 30 million euros.”

Nouvel, speaking about the firm’s demise, told me: “That was a very hard period for me. I was not in a very confident position. I had a partner working with me who never told me we were in trouble, and in three months we were done.” After the firm was reconstituted in 1994, Nouvel remained a salaried employee for a decade, while he repaid his personal debts and taxes. He now owns half the firm.

Nouvel can be very nonchalant about finances. “I’ve never met anybody who cares less about money,” says his friend Gilbert Brownstone, who helped bail Nouvel out during the bankruptcy. “He loves Italian food and great wine. As long as he has that, he can’t be bothered.” But Brownstone has resolved to find Nouvel a personal accountant, and Pelissié told me, “I think now Jean has to earn money for his life and his family.” Nouvel has been married twice, and had a long relationship as well with the mother of his two sons, who today are a 28-year-old mathematician and computer expert and a 26-year-old video maker and set designer. With his second wife, Nouvel had a daughter, now 13, who suffered brain damage during birth; although she eventually did learn to talk and walk, she will require assistance all her life. “The brain is a strange thing, but she can never become completely normal,” Nouvel said. “She cannot retain attention. She likes to play with a computer, but she cannot write. She takes very interesting photographs, so I hope she will be a very special photographer.”

An ardent nightclubber in his younger days (he met Brownstone when they were regulars at the upstairs bar at Les Bains Douches in Paris), Nouvel no longer stays out all night. For two years he has been living with Mia Hagg, a beautiful 37-year-old Swedish architect who worked for him, then for five years for Herzog & de Meuron and now has her own practice. “She has made him much happier than he has been in a long time,” Brownstone told me.

O n the day he led a tour for the Greek delegation (who would announce the next month that they were selecting Renzo Piano), Nouvel held a lunchtime meeting in a stylish bistro with four colleagues, to discuss his preliminary ideas for a competition to build a large hotel project in Las Vegas. Nouvel’s was one of four architecture firms invited to submit a design concept in late February for this joint venture between the MGM Mirage company and the South African resort tycoon Sol Kerzner. It is a huge undertaking, with about seven million square feet of space. In addition to the functional requirements (parking, casino, hotel rooms), Kerzner specified a gigantic aquarium, which he has made a trademark feature of his leisure destinations.

After the waiter took the orders for the three-course lunch and the bottles of red and white wine, the younger men waited to see what the boss had come up with.

“I don’t care about neighbors,” Nouvel began. “There is contextual architecture, but in Las Vegas. . . .” His voice trailed off. As his junior colleagues well knew, Las Vegas is a consummate postmodern pastiche — the apotheosis of what Nouvel’s late friend, the post-Structuralist theorist Jean Baudrillard, referred to as the simulacrum. Walking down the Strip in Las Vegas, you will encounter ersatz reproductions of New York, Paris, Venice, ancient Egypt and ancient Rome. If there is any context to Las Vegas, it is one of spectacular inauthenticity.

Having developed his ideas for the Las Vegas competition while traveling over the Christmas holidays, Nouvel was meeting for the first time with the project team. He prefers to dream up his concepts away from the office: either in bed in the mornings or, even better, in the South of France during the summer, when he heads to St. Paul de Vence, a village near Nice, to swim, to incubate his ideas in tranquility and to meet periodically with colleagues or clients who fly down. “He is a really hard worker, but he has a way to organize people with his life,” says his friend Patrick Seguin, who owns a leading Paris gallery of mid-20th-century furniture. “Probably half his business is done around the table. If he works 14 hours a day, it is seven hours at the table.”

Over lunch in Paris, the team of architects passed around reference photographs: of aquarium fauna and flora; Monument Valley and the Canyon de Chelly in Arizona; and a variety of colorful minerals extracted from the Mojave Desert. There was also a geologic map of Nevada.

“I will keep the idea that Vegas has to talk about Vegas, and not about Brazil, Egypt, Paris,” Nouvel said. Instead of arbitrarily replicating some tourist mecca, he wanted his simulacrum to be of Las Vegas itself — or at least of Las Vegas before it became “Vegas.” The arid landscape appealed to him. He was also intrigued by the programmatic inclusion of an aquarium. “For me there is something paradoxical about the aquarium and the desert,” he told his team. “It could be poetic. I want to play with that.” He emphasized that the hotel complex must “exist in a universe of ‘wow’ objects but create a difference, a strong difference.” He envisioned a wall of towers and lower buildings that stretched for four-tenths of a mile and resembled a canyon.

“You mean it looks like Monument Valley,” said Emmanuel Blamont, the project director.

“I don’t know,” Nouvel said. “I want to see a lot of photographs of geography. For me, this project is a landscape. Not a lot of fake rocks, or a set for a Hollywood western. We have to do a big garden.” Like an 18th-century “English garden,” it would cultivate the illusion of a wild setting, except, in this case, the model would be an American desert, not an English dell. “What I like, and it exists in the Colorado Valley, is Aeolian shapes eroded by wind, and we can create a wall with an Aeolian profile,” Nouvel continued. He envisioned an entry into the complex that would descend gradually, between the rough, red-earth-colored “canyon walls” (fabricated of real stone at the lower levels); the view would end, in an exaggerated perspective, in “something very strong, maybe just a little crack, like a canyon.” And the acrylic-glass aquarium would be a quarter-mile long, descending to give the sense of “the abyss, with fishes with their own light,” while higher up, there would be dolphins, with sunlight shining through the water. “Of course, you will understand very quickly that it is artificial,” he said. “It’s like a garden in an old city. You go down with water in the middle, and you know it is artificial, but it is still a big emotion.”

SINCE THE FIRM'S RESURRECTION in 1994, business has steadily grown. In 2001, it won the commission for what became Nouvel’s first big American project, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. Located in the mill-and-warehouse district that is the city’s historic heart, the building in its formal volumes echoes the silos nearby. Once again, Nouvel was looking for a way to connect to the particular culture of the place. “When you go to São Paulo or Tokyo, it is always the same typologies,” he told me. “I am against parachuted architecture.”

Even before the Guthrie, Nouvel was brought in on a smaller American commission: to design the SoHo project at 40 Mercer Street, which was politically sensitive. The architect helped win approval from the referees at the local community board, the landmarks-preservation commission and the city planning commission. “When I arrive, generally it’s a very delicate situation,” Nouvel told me. “If they have no problem, they don’t come to me.”

One of the developers behind 40 Mercer was Hines, which is hoping for similar success on its next-to-MoMA tower. To select an architect, Hines invited five top-drawer firms to present two schemes — “what you want to do and a reasonable one,” as Nouvel describes it. He said that he jotted off a quick sketch for the “reasonable” alternative and concentrated on the audacious entry. “It could be unreasonable if you didn’t have the brand of MoMA, but it is reasonable here,” he explained to me. But according to David Penick, a vice president at Hines, what was remarkable about Nouvel’s audacious scheme was that it was, in fact, the so-called “reasonable” one: it observed the arcane zoning restrictions for the Midtown site.

The site posed challenges. The footprint is very small; and, because of the land-acquisition costs (MoMA sold the prime parcel of real estate to Hines for $125 million), the building had to be very tall. To Nouvel this suggested a thin skyscraper that would evoke classic New York, circa 1930, without slipping into the schmaltz of historicism. Instead of drawing inspiration from such landmarks as the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building, he perused the architectural drawings of Hugh Ferriss, whose moody renderings of New York skyscrapers at that time (some real, most of them invented) conjured an iconic Manhattan that still stirs imaginations (especially those of comic-book artists) today. Unlike the boxy high-rises that mushroomed in the ’60s near the museum, the towers envisioned three decades earlier by Ferriss taper into spires.

It made sense for Nouvel to consult Ferriss, because the artist was responding to the setbacks mandated by the 1916 New York zoning law, which even now dictates the twists and bends of Nouvel’s skyscraper. “I was fascinated by his drawings of the ‘needle city,”’ Nouvel recalled. “I thought in this neighborhood of rectangular buildings, a needle would make sense.” Nouvel says that he views himself as a contextual architect. “Contextuality is to give additional value to what is around you,” he says. “I researched the rhythm. When I placed the building to be like the other ones, it was stupid. If you go up and the other ones are lower, that is what I call the rhythm of the city.” Architects are the most practical of artists. Nouvel came up with a scheme that fulfilled his aesthetic ambitions, satisfied the developer’s need to build high (twice as tall as the Museum Tower) and provided a rationale that may well persuade the city’s planning and landmarks authorities to issue the always fiercely debated permits.

The Hines glass tower will house hotel rooms, condo apartments and additional museum exhibition space. (The commission does not include the design of the galleries; MoMA, which retains ownership of them, will determine that configuration once the building plans are set.) For the architect, who likes to refer to himself as an illusionist, the trick here is make everything disappear except the heavy trusses that brace the building externally. Standing inside an apartment, you should feel as though you are on a construction site, with nothing but steel beams separating you from the throbbing, glamorous city. It requires the most up-to-date engineering to accomplish, but at the end of all the research lies a very simple concept — a paean to the skyward thrust and power of New York. “I like to play with the story of the city,” Nouvel told me. Having carefully studied the text, he is ready to write his own chapter.

Art and Museums in New York City

A guide to the shows, exhibitions and artists shaping the city’s cultural landscape..

Pieces add up to an archive of a life lived deeply  in Lyle Ashton Harris’s compelling survey at the Queens Museum.

The photographer Vivian Maier was a supremely gifted chameleon. But even in her striking new exhibition at Fotografiska , she remains in the shadows.

Ray Johnson, the artist you meet in a small, revelatory show, is quite different from the one known for mail art  and his later gritty samplings of popular culture.

At the Museum of Modern Art, the documentary photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier honors those who turn their energies to a social good .

Looking for more art in the city? Here are the gallery shows not to miss in June .

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œuvre du musée

Tour sans fins

Numéro d'inventaire

Galerie d'architecture moderne et contemporaine

Précisions sur le numéro d'inventaire

Marqué le 2021-07-20

Propriété de l’État, Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, musée des Monuments français

© Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Musée des monuments français, Paris

(Photo : Bergeret, Gaston.)

Auteur(s) de l'œuvre du musée

• Nouvel, Jean - 1945 (Concepteur)
• Carrafont (Maquettiste)

Maquette réalisée dans le cadre de la politique de création de maquettes du MMF, en vue de l'ouverture de la Cité de l'architecture et du patrimoine en septembre 2007. Maquette réalisée en collaboration avec les Ateliers Jean Nouvel.

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• Résine polyester

socle en bois?

Prof. : 90 cm

H : 380 cm; l : 90 cm

Echelle : 1/150

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œuvre de référence

Nouvel, Jean - 1945

Edifice de référence

Puteaux - Tour sans fins

Localisation

Puteaux, Hauts-de-Seine, Ile-de-France, France

Mise à jour le 26/07/2021

œuvres en relation

Infrastructures de transport du quartier Seine Rive Gauche

Décor mural pour l'Assemblée nationale d'Abidjan

Pillet, Edgard - 29 juillet 1912 - Gironde - 1996 - Paris

Assemblée nationale

Pavillon de la France à l'Exposition universelle de Montréal

Faugeron, Jean - 1915 - 1983

Montréal - Pavillon français à l'Exposition universelle de 1967 Auteur(s) de l'édifice Faugeron, Jean - 1915 - 1983 : Architecte

Le Monolithe

MVRDV - Rotterdam - Pays-Bas

Lyon - Le Monolithe Auteur(s) de l'édifice ECDM (Emmanuel Combarel, Dominique Marrec) - Paris : Architecte Egeraat, Erick van - Pays-Bas : Architecte Gautrand, Manuelle - 1961 : Architecte Gautier, Pierre : Architecte MVRDV - Rotterdam - Pays-Bas : Architecte

Comparaison de l'emprise au sol d'une cité jardin "horizontale" et d'une cité jardin "verticale"

Le Corbusier, (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, dit) - 1887 - 1965

Marseille - Unité d'habitation Auteur(s) de l'édifice Le Corbusier, (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, dit) - 1887 - 1965

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Chroniques d‘architecture

Actualité de l‘architecture

A Paris, cinq tours et puis s’en vont

11 janvier 2016

Dans la plaine de Shinar, les hommes avaient voulu ériger un bâtiment pouvant toucher le ciel. Enfer et damnation ! La Tour de Babel ne fut jamais achevée. Aujourd’hui en France, malgré la technologie domestiquée, les projets de tours demeurent encore le plus souvent de papier. Avant de devenir légendes urbaines ? Florilège en cinq projets exemplaires.

Les utopies urbaines et sociales des années 20 : les villes-tours d’Auguste Perret

Au tournant des années 20, les utopies sociales et la doctrine de l’architecture moderne s’accordent au sujet de la surpopulation de Paris. Pour répondre à cette problématique, Auguste Perret publie à partir de 1915 un projet un peu fou. Il propose de construire entre la Porte Maillot et la forêt de Saint-Germain, plus de trois cent « tours-maisons ». Ces constructions, hautes de 250 mètres, devaient aussi s’élever autour de l’actuel périphérique. Les immeubles de soixante étages étaient assis sur des socles de huit niveaux, reliés entre eux par des ponts.

Quelques années avant le film Metropolis , Perret était précurseur des programmes mixtes puisque les étages supérieurs devaient accueillir des logements tandis que le socle était réservé à des commerces et à des bureaux. Laissant de côté la complexité urbaine et sociale issue d’une ville presque deux fois millénaire, l’architecte proposait une architecture rationnelle dans laquelle l’habitat de masse devait répondre aux problématiques humaines et économiques.

Si ce projet n’a vu le jour, c’est peut-être en raison de la crise économique que la France a connue dès la fin des années 20, mais sans doute également en raison de son extravagance et de son envergure. En 1942, Perret finira par concevoir la tour qui porte son nom à Amiens. Achevée en 1960, haute de 110 m, implantée dans un quartier que l’architecte voulait à la fois résidentiel, commercial et tertiaire, elle fut longtemps la plus haute tour d’Europe.

Les épopées modernistes

Le Phare du Monde, Eugène Freyssinet, 1937

Le Phare du Monde fut présenté lors de l’Exposition Universelle de 1937 de Paris. L’ingénieur Eugène Freyssinet proposait une tour vrillée conçue en béton armé et haute de plus de 700 mètres. Le Phare devait accueillir le plus grand restaurant du monde, un hôtel et un solarium. Une route courait le long pour permettre aux voitures d’accéder à un parking au sommet.

La tour ne sera pas construite en raison des problèmes techniques architecturaux et mécaniques inhérents à un projet de cette ampleur. Un projet certes fou mais novateur et futuriste tant il présentait l’importance de l’automobile comme mode de déplacement futur.

Le plus étonnant peut-être est que ce projet était apparemment destiné au public américain, ce dont témoignent les dessins fantaisistes signés par un certain Williamson et les légendes en anglais. Eugène Freyssinet avait-il déjà inventé la communication ? Il est permis de le penser. D’autant qu’il pouvait déjà se targuer à l’époque de plusieurs records du monde pour la portée de ses ponts. Au final, l’ingénieur n’a jamais construit de tour nulle part, ni même de pont aux Etats-Unis.

La tour lumière cybernétique, Nicolas Schöffer, 1970

Au bord de l’actuelle autoroute A13, à 2 km du centre de la Défense, aurait pu culminer à 347 mètres au-dessus de nos tête un engin des plus curieux.

Imaginé dès 1963 par Nicolas Schöffer, sculpteur et peintre, le gratte-ciel avait une structure complexe à ossature en acier inoxydable. Toute une batterie d’instruments de mesure du temps, de l’air, de l’eau, devaient prendre place sur chacun des sept étages envisagés, ainsi que plus de 3 226 projecteurs de toutes couleurs et 2000 flashs, associés à 330 miroirs tournants de 40 mètres carrés, le tout commandé par un ordinateur central. L’objet, selon son concepteur, avait vocation à devenir une sorte de baromètre de la vie parisienne que l’on pourrait consulter à distance ainsi qu’un guide pour les avions supersoniques atterrissant à Paris-nord.

Exercice de style technologique, les études complètes furent achevées mais, malgré l’engouement des présidents De Gaulle et Pompidou, la tour ne vit jamais le jour, faute de financement. Pas découragé, Nicolas Schöffer proposa son projet pour le Liberty Parc du New Jersey et encore en 2002 après l’attentat des World Trade Center.

Au final, l’artiste est parvenu à construire une «Tour cybernétique» à Liège, en Belgique. Avec ses 52 mètres de haut, cette oeuvre d’art monumentale fut inaugurée en 1961. Des travaux de restauration sont en cours.

Les signaux urbains

La tour sans fin, Jean Nouvel, La Défense

Dès 1989, l’architecte Jean Nouvel propose à l’Etablissement public pour l’aménagement de la région de la Défense (EPAD) un élégant projet de tour cylindrique, minimal et d’une grande simplicité formelle : la tour, de 425 mètres, devait devenir la plus élancée du monde.

Installée entre la Grande Arche et le CNIT, elle devait, selon l’architecte, être une mesure pour La Défense et définir la verticalité du quartier. Les concepteurs avaient imaginé une construction aux limites floues, un objet évanescent tendant vers le fantomatique, dense en partie basse et dont le sommet, aéré, disparaissait dans les nuages. Cette impression était renforcée par un dégradé visuel. La base était conçue en granit noir, tandis que le sommet s’achevait par une structure de verre. Techniquement, et contrairement à la plus grande majorité des gratte-ciel américains, ici pas de noyau central; Jean Nouvel propose « des espaces libre sans géométrie contrainte »

Le projet, estimé à 274 400 000 euros, a été abandonné en 2000, pour des raisons financières et peut-être politiques.

A noter qu’en 1989 encore, Jean Nouvel proposait également un étrange projet intitulé Three Towers à Rotterdam, soit trois tours reliées en leur sommet par une passerelle, un design qui n’est pas sans rappeler le projet imaginé par l’architecte Moshe Safdie et livré en 2010 à Singapour.

Ironie de l’histoire, Jean Nouvel a construit des tours un peu partout dans le monde sauf en France, si l’on excepte la tour Horizon à Boulogne-Billancourt au socle anthracite tandis que le sommet s’achève par une structure de verre.

La tour signal, Jean Nouvel, La Défense (2007-2010)

La tour signal trouve ses racines dans un bruyant concours international d’architecture lancé en 2007 par l’EPAD et s’insérant dans le plan de rénovation du quartier d’affaires parisien.

Toutes les stars étaient au rendez-vous et l’équipe lauréate fut celle de Jean Nouvel, presque vingt ans après le début des études pour la tour sans fin. La tour devait « remettre Paris et sa région sur la carte de l’invention du monde urbain ».

L’architecte conçut une tour parallélépipédique, de 301 mètres, soit 71 étages, formée de quatre cubes superposés. La construction était de verre et d’acier. Un écran numérique géant tournait à son sommet. La construction avait pour ambition de faire entrer le quartier d’affaires dans l’ère numérique et la révolution de l’image.

En guise de révolution, dès 2009, les investisseurs se retiraient du projet, évalué à plus de 600 millions d’euros. Devenu  symbole de la crise immobilière et financière, il fut définitivement abandonné en 2010. Lot de consolation, Nouvel emporte en 2015 le concours des tours DUO qui seront édifiées au bout de l’avenue de France dans le XIIIe arrondissement de Paris. Livraison prévue : 2020

Bref, qu’ils soient architectes, ingénieurs, entrepreneurs ou artistes, les concepteurs de gratte-ciel à Paris se sont in fine bien souvent cassés les dents. Ce n’est pas Thom Mayne (Morphosis), lauréat acclamé en 2010 d’une tour Phare qui elle non plus ne verra jamais le jour, qui nous démentira.

Ce dernier projet fut définitivement abandonné en 2015 par Unibail, maître d’ouvrage. Bienvenue, sous la houlette de Christian de Portzamparc, aux tours Sisters, un projet à 630 millions d’euros au lieu des 900 millions initialement prévus. Quoiqu’il en soit, Herzog & de Meuron, avec le même client, peuvent croiser les doigts pour leur tour Triangle.

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• You are here: Reputations

Jean Nouvel (1945-)

2 November 2018 By Andrew Ayers Reputations

Whether text and context, image and simulacrum – or just smoke and mirrors, Jean Nouvel’s architectural ambitions are no less grandiose than his legendary epicureanism 

Jean Nouvel

Illustration by Marianna Gefen

Now well into his eighth decade on Earth, and his sixth on Planet Architecture, Jean Nouvel is showing no signs of slowing down. After last year’s critically acclaimed Louvre Abu Dhabi, he’s about to deliver another desert mirage in the form of the National Museum of Qatar (due to open this December), is continuing work on Manhattan’s 320m 53W53 (aka the MoMA Tower), which topped out this summer, and, in his native France, will be inaugurating yet another tower this autumn, the 135m-high La Marseillaise on the waterfront in Marseille. And these are just the most visible among the countless current projects being undertaken by Ateliers Jean Nouvel (AJN), an international firm that employs around 140 people and has an annual turnover oscillating between a pre-crash, 2008 high of €54 million and a more modest but still significant €27.3 million in 2015 (the most recent figure available). 

‘With his epicureanism comes the silhouette of a bon viveur, a bourgeois embonpoint straight out of Balzac’

Source: Didier Zylberyng / Alamy

The Institut du Monde Arabe, 1987, clad in a mechanical mashrabiya composed of shutters designed to open and close according to light levels, but the mechanisms were prone to stick

Yet this flurry of activity, at an age that not so long ago was considered crepuscular, is entirely in keeping with the character of a man long reputed for his larger-than-life appetites. His personal ambition is legendary, as evidenced by his often reckless pursuit of prestige projects. First there was the 92-storey Tour sans Fins, or Endless Tower, at Paris-La Défense in 1989, an endless saga that was only finally laid to rest with Nouvel’s bankruptcy in 1994. Then came the Musée du Quai Branly in 2006, a gargantuan anthropological museum which ran two years over schedule and €64 million over budget, and on which AJN reportedly lost €5 million. Following close on its heels was the personal debacle of the 2015 Philharmonie de Paris, another in-the-red affair for AJN which his then business partner, Michel Pélissié, had pleaded with him not to do (given the way things had gone on Quai Branly), and which Nouvel famously disowned on inauguration day, describing his project as ‘martyrised’ and ‘sabotaged’ and the barely half-finished concert hall as ‘counterfeit’. And finally, after a loss-making year for AJN in 2012, the 2013 competition for the National Art Museum of China (NAMOC), which Nouvel was so determined to win that he sank €2.5 million into it, imperilling his firm’s finances yet further and destroying, he later revealed, his friendship with rival contender Frank Gehry – a heavy price to pay for a project which, at the time of writing, seems to have been quietly shelved by the Chinese authorities. ‘If I win Beijing, I’ll be the greatest architect in the world!’ he reportedly declared; all trace of the NAMOC has since been quietly removed from the AJN website.

The Nemausus housing blocks in Nîmes, 1987, a radical early project that brought Nouvel to wider attention

‘No one resists the will of Jean Nouvel, he’s a steamroller, a true madman,’ says architect Francis Soler. ‘He built his career by killing others. He lives only for that.’ But perhaps not quite only for that, since just a tad less legendary than his personal ambition is his epicureanism: the 14,000 bottles of wine that were cited in the 2014 lawsuit that followed his falling out with Pélissié; the secluded garden table permanently at his disposal at the Colombe d’Or, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, where he goes every summer to work; or his taste for the fattest of phallic Havana cigars à la Mies van der Rohe or Che Guevara. 

And with this epicureanism comes the silhouette of a bon viveur, a bourgeois embonpoint straight out of Balzac, which his mentor Claude Parent described as ‘a mass which moves with the majesty of a bear’ – a bear invariably swathed in black, ’80s-architect style, and coiffed with a trademark fedora to protect a glabrous head which the Swiss cartoonist Exem infamously likened to Nosferatu, part of a (successful) 2016 campaign to sink Nouvel’s ambitious plans for the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. Addicted to sports cars – Porsches, Ferraris – Nouvel lives life in the fast lane, spending his way through a fortune, and continues to accelerate with age, running quicker than ever to keep feeding the machine and, just perhaps, beat the inevitable. His life partners, in inverse proportion, have become ever younger – his third and current wife, Chinese architect Lida Guan, whom he met during the NAMOC competition, and with whom he has a two-year-old daughter, is 34 years his junior.

Doha Tower, 2012

A cross section through the priapic tip of the Doha Tower, 2012, a 46-storey cylinder wrapped in a double-skinned aluminium lattice

Key works  

Nemausus housing, Nîmes, 1987 Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 1987 Saint-James Hotel, Bouliac, 1989 Fondation Cartier, Paris, 1994  Congress Centre, Lucerne, 2000 Torre Agbar, Barcelona, 2004 Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid, 2005 Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, 2006  Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis, 2006 One New Change, London, 2010 Philharmonie de Paris, 2015 Louvre Abu Dhabi, 2017

Aga Khan Award for Architecture, 1989 Pritzker Prize, 2008 

‘The future of architecture is no longer architectural’

Saint-James Hotel

Source: Stephane Couturier / Artedia / View

The rusted steel volumes of the boutique Saint-James Hotel, 1989, are set in a rural vineyard

‘Only sporadically a formalist, he believes that architecture should procure pleasure, but that which his offers often seeks its effects in flimsy flat-screen window dressing’

A child of the Dordogne, land of foie gras and confit de canard, Nouvel was born to a school-inspector father and an English-teacher mother. Like so many architects, he initially wanted to study fine art, but his parents pushed him towards a safer occupation, which he began studying in Bordeaux before transferring to Paris’s École des Beaux-Arts in 1966, from which he graduated in 1972. The events of May 1968 coincided with the three-year period he spent working with Claude Parent and Paul Virilio between 1967 and 1970, which culminated in the founding of his first firm and his first solo competition entry, in 1971, for the Centre Pompidou: a project that paid discipular homage to his mentor’s fonction oblique (less obviously, the Philharmonie de Paris also channels the Parental diagonals). To this day, he cites Structuralist and Post-Structuralist figures such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze as his maîtres à penser , not to mention Jean Baudrillard, whom he knew well.

Torre Agbar, 2004

Source: Dennis Gilbert / View

The unabashedly phallic Torre Agbar intrudes on Barcelona’s skyline

The year he founded his firm he was appointed as architect to the Biennale de Paris – an art fair which, without a permanent home, needed temporary scenography for each edition – to which he succeeded in adding an architecture section in 1978. It was no doubt this early proximity to contemporary art and scenography that informed many of the tics and mannerisms of his later work – the taste for a concept-based approach overflowing with multiple contextual references, not to mention his liberal use of the set designer’s and/or night-clubber’s box of perceptual tricks. Rare is the Nouvel project that takes more than a perfunctory interest in tectonics, engineering, how things stand up or the intrinsic materiality of materials. A notable exception is perhaps his Lucerne congress centre with its giant cantilevered roof which establishes a calm artificial horizon against the backdrop of the Alps. 

Instead it’s a question of text and context, image and simulacrum – or just smoke and mirrors, according to his detractors. ‘The future of architecture is no longer architectural,’ he declared in 1980, by which he meant that rather than remaining a closed discipline, as it seemed to be in the technocratic France of the time, ‘architecture needed to seek its sources in the culture of today, in other disciplines’, and fully embrace the nature of the society of which it was the ultimate expression. At its best, when he doesn’t overdo it, his is an approach that can enchant with its theatrical blurring of boundaries, its poetic feeling for atmosphere and its light-hearted play with signs and signifiers: the winking mechanical mashrabiyas of the Institut du Monde Arabe, the tree-filled mise en abyme of the crystalline Fondation Cartier, or the pluie de lumière that filters through the intricate metal-mesh dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi. 

Louvre Abu Dhabi, 2017

Source: Slywire / Wikimedia

The vast latticed dome of the Louvre Abu Dhabi combines grand gesture with pluie de lumière atmospherics

Source: Collection Artedia / View

The Fondation Cartier, 1994, a monumental crystalline display case for contemporary art

But at its worst it can come across as too much noise, facile and heavy-handed, as at the Quai Branly, where no one seems to have been able to tell him when to stop, and where the plethora of finishes led to notably poor execution, as the screws were tightened on the deliberately under-estimated budget. It’s not as if he hadn’t been warned. In a 1997 conversation with Baudrillard, the philosopher said to him: ‘If one plans too much, if the conceptualisation is too dense, the seam becomes depleted, and I think that’s also true with respect to theoretical research: those who cumulate too many references, who pile up the data and explain ad infinitum a trajectory, exhaust themselves before saying, what? Nothing.’

In many ways Nouvel followed the classic trajectory of his fellow soixante-huitards. An outsider and troublemaker in his early days – a left-leaning, rock ’n’ roll, nouvelle vague rebel who founded the Mars 1976 movement in opposition to the Athens Charter establishment that then held sway in France – he has now become exactly the establishment he sought to usurp, a millionaire architecte d’état who wields enormous influence, even if that position has been weakened in the wake of the Philharmonie train wreck. Where, before the fall, he could bag a competition despite the fact that seven of the eight architects in the jury didn’t vote for him (the Philharmonie, where he clearly enjoyed the support of higher powers), he afterwards whined, without the slightest hint of irony or self awareness, that he ‘could no longer get hold of [Aurélie] Filippetti [the then culture minister]. All of a sudden I couldn’t get hold of anybody. Which is absolutely incredible given my situation in France. Incredible! I’d never been treated like that in my whole life!’

‘No one resists the will of Jean Nouvel, he’s a steamroller, a true madman’

If he got there, it was in part thanks to his enormous talent, so typical of the 1980s when he came of age, for image, marketing and the manipulation of the visual mechanisms of the  société du spectacle . In the context of Mitterrand’s 1981 election victory, after seven years of small-c Giscardian cultural conservatism, he was in the right place at the right time, winning the competition to build one of the early presidential Grands Projets, IMA (the building that brought him both national and international fame). Rather than dialoguing physically with its given site, much of his architecture has a tendency to converse with it intellectually in a film-script scenario; space, with Nouvel, is often just a question of depth of field. Only sporadically a formalist, he believes that architecture should procure pleasure, but that which his offers often seeks its effects in flimsy flat-screen window dressing.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi, 2017, on the cover of L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui , France’s leading architecture magazine, which Nouvel acquired in 2007 in an attempt to save it, but then quickly lost interest in

This glossy PR tendency in his oeuvre reached an apogee of self-caricature in his 2007 design for the packaging (branded ‘design by Jean Nouvel’) of Yves Saint-Laurent’s perfume L’Homme : a sort of mechanic’s butt plug, the bottle takes the form of an inverted phallic test tube à la Torre Agbar, a suppository-smooth bolt which screws into an anthracite nut. Just as the fragrance ‘mixes virility and fragility’, Nouvel wrote on jeannouveldesign.fr, ‘the bottle possesses a consciously virile symbolism; in contrast, the delicacy of the glass implies a form of fragility and softness. A play of light traverses the glass and the scent. That’s what makes the bottle as precious as the luxurious perfume it contains’. Brad Pitt, it turns out, is such a diehard fan of Nouvel’s that he named his first biological daughter Shiloh Nouvel in the architect’s honour – as brand recognition goes, you couldn’t do much better.

Jean nouvel 176l 1200x1577 q60

Nouvel’s career is far from over, and it remains to be seen how the future will pan out. Were he to retire today, he would be remembered for a dozen or so excellent buildings bobbing about in a sea of less interesting – and sometimes frankly mediocre – projects, as well as for having embodied certain fin de millénaire tendencies in the Zeitgeist. Is he suddenly going to surprise us with an unexpected late period? Or will he carry on as he always has, nineteen to the dozen, churning them out left, right and centre, the good, the bad and the indifferent, in a blistering blowout of building bulimia?

This piece is featured in the AR October issue on Food – click  here  to purchase your copy today 

October 2018

Since 1896, The Architectural Review has scoured the globe for architecture that challenges and inspires. Buildings old and new are chosen as prisms through which arguments and broader narratives are constructed. In their fearless storytelling, independent critical voices explore the forces that shape the homes, cities and places we inhabit.

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How to intervene in the robust chaos of the Paris business centre La Défense... to build next to the "Tour sans Fin” - Europe’s eventual seventh wonder. It is impossible, by definition to compete with this tower by Jean Nouvel. The potential contrast is between the sublime and the banal.

Collaborators

Checkpoint charlie apartments, alliance française, uno – maison des droits de l’homme, la defense masterplan, mission grand axe, signal tower, la defense projet phare, gold coast cultural precinct, moma charette, nhow amsterdam rai hotel, agadir convention centre, yokohama masterplan, stedelijk museum, het paard van troje, souterrain tram tunnel.

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Jean Nouvel, dans ma tête, dans mon œil… appartenances…

Du 7 novembre 2019 au 1 mars 2020

À propos de l’exposition

Du 7 novembre 2019 au 1er mars 2020, le Power Station of Art et le Fonds Jean Nouvel pour le rayonnement de l'architecture contemporaine sont heureux de présenter en collaboration avec la Fondation Cartier la première exposition individuelle chinoise de l’architecte français Jean Nouvel, lauréat du Prix Pritzker d’architecture et du Lion d’or de la Biennale d’Architecture de Venise. À l’occasion de cette exposition intitulée Jean Nouvel, dans ma tête, dans mon œil... appartenances... Jean Nouvel est invité à transformer l’espace d’exposition en un théâtre d’ombres et de lumières, renouvelant ainsi les codes de la scénographie classique. L’exposition débutera par la projection exclusive d’un film de cinq heures et demie réalisé par Jean Nouvel, puis une série de six œuvres d’art intitulées « Emergences» et inspirées par son architecture permettront aux visiteurs de découvrir l’univers créatif de l’architecte, de partager ses pensées et ses émotions.

Avec plus de 200 constructions à son actif, Jean Nouvel est probablement l’un des architectes contemporains les plus prolifiques aujourd’hui. Grand tenant du changement et de l’innovation depuis le début de sa carrière, Jean Nouvel n’a eu de cesse de lutter contre une architecture stéréotypée et globalisée, donnant une attention toute particulière à l’ancrage géographique et aux émotions véhiculées par l’architecture. Grâce à l’emploi de nouveaux matériaux et technologies, il tisse des liens harmonieux entre ses édifices, leur environnement et leur contexte historique pour entrer en résonnance avec les habitants. La lumière est un élément central de l’architecture de Jean Nouvel. Il l’utilise avec maestria pour révéler la complexité et la diversité des différents espaces d’un édifice, et créer une continuité narrative.

Pour Jean Nouvel, architectes et réalisateurs jouent des rôles similaires, et le processus de création d’un édifice n’est pas si différent du tournage d’un film. Cette première exposition chinoise lui fournit l’occasion de réaliser son « rêve de réalisateur », grâce à la projection de son premier film en avant-première au Power Station of Art. Ce film de trois heures et demie présentera plus de 100 projets architecturaux conçus par Jean Nouvel aux quatre coins du monde. Au travers d’un montage et d’images tout en poésie, et narré de manière onirique par l’architecte, le film retrace la carrière architecturale de Jean Nouvel et dévoile son attention au monde qui l’entoure. l’architecte espère que cette exposition — centrée sur son processus réflexif, ses pensées et son imagination — sera « un acte de rébellion contre le conformisme ». Grâce à la vidéo comme support d’illustration, la créativité foisonnante de Jean Nouvel s’incarne ici dans des rythmes et des formes physiques qui permettent de fixer sa pensée éphémère et d’ouvrir de nouveaux dialogues.

En parallèle du film, l’exposition présentera des œuvres d’art inspirées de six architectures emblématiques de la carrière de Jean Nouvel, à savoir le « Centre Culture et Congrès Lucerne», la « Tête Défense », la « Tour Sans Fins », la « Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain » à Paris, les grands magasins « Galeries Lafayette » à Berlin , et le « 53W53 », une tour de verre servant notamment d’extension au Museum of Modern Art de New York.

Dans la lignée du cycle « Architecture & City » Exhibitions and Researches du Power Station of Art, cette exposition entend présenter sous un nouveau jour la dimension culturelle et la sensibilité à l’œuvre dans les créations de l’architecte. En montrant comment le jeu fascinant de l’ombre et de la lumière révèlent l’émotion et la puissance de l’architecture, elle donne ainsi au public de multiples clefs d’interprétation pour appréhender celle-ci.

Je suis depuis toujours sensible aux architectures de lumière. Ma préoccupation, mon ambition, c’est en effet souvent de jouer avec des bâtiments qui baignent dans le continuum spatial, qui appartiennent à l’air. Ce jeu sur la dématérialisation fait paradoxalement de la Fondation Cartier le bâtiment sans doute le plus imprégné dans son site que j’aie réussi à faire. Jean Nouvel

Jean Nouvel

Après des études à l’école des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, il est admis premier au concours d’entrée de l’École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris en 1966 dont il sort diplômé en 1971. Assistant de l’architecte Claude Parent et inspiré par l’urbaniste et essayiste Paul Virilio, il ouvre sa première agence en 1970. Peu après, il cofonde le mouvement « Mars 1976 » qui lutte contre le corporatisme puis participe à la création du Syndicat de l’Architecture.

De nombreux prix et distinctions, en France comme à l’étranger, témoignent de la reconnaissance de son œuvre. Il reçoit en 1989 le Prix Aga Khan d’Architecture pour l’Institut du Monde arabe, « passerelle réussie entre les cultures française et arabe ». En 2000, il obtient le Lion d’or de la VIIᵉ Exposition internationale d’Architecture – Biennale de Venise. En 2001, trois des plus hautes distinctions internationales lui sont attribuées : la Médaille d’or royale de l’Institut royal des Architectes britanniques (RIBA), le Praemium Imperiale pour l’Architecture et le Premio internazionale di Architettura Francesco Borromini de la Ville de Rome pour le Centre Culture et Congrès Lucerne – KKL. En 2002, le Royal College of Art de Londres lui décerne le titre honorifique de Docteur Honoris Causa. Trois and plus tard, il reçoit le prix annuel de la Wolf Foundation d’Israël pour le remercier d’avoir « fourni un nouveau modèle contextualiste et redefini le dialogue entre les deux caratectéristiques principales de l’architecture contemporaine : le pragmatisme et l’éphémère ». Il reçoit également le prestigieux Pritzker Prize en 2008. En France, il a été distingué, entre autres récompenses, par la Grande Médaille d’or de l’Académie d’Architecture et a reçu par deux fois le prix de l’Équerre d’argent et le Grand Prix national de France pour l’architecture.

PSA « Architecture & City » Exhibitions and Researches

En 2013, le Power Station of Art lance « Architecture & City » Exhibitions and Researches, un cycle annuel d’expositions thématiques, accompagné de séminaires et d’un catalogue de publications. Partant de l’architecture comme dispositif social global, le PSA souhaite raconter l’histoire des villes et de leurs habitants, tout en explorant les relations étroites entre les hommes, l’espace et les mécanismes de pouvoir. À ce jour, le musée a déjà organisé de nombreuses expositions sur le thème de l’architecture, parmi lesquelles Piece by Piece: Renzo Piano Building Workshop (2015), Mobile Architecture: Yona Friedman (2015), Bernard Tschumi – Architecture: Concept & Notation (2016), Ordinary Metropolis – Shanghai: A Model of Urbanism (2016), Balkrishna Doshi: Celebrating Habitat – The Real, the Virtual & the Imaginary (2017), Superstudio 50 (2017), The Rise of Modernity: The First Generation of Chinese Architects from the University of Pennsylvania (2018), Hélène Binet: Dialoghi, Works from 1988 to 2018 (2019), et Junya Ishigami, Freeing Architecture (2019).

Galerie d’images

Courtesy of Power Station of Art

Jean Nouvel et la Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain

L’amitié entre Jean Nouvel et la Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain commençe à la fin des années 1980. La Fondation Cartier est alors à Jouy-en-Josas, en périphérie parisienne. Cartier demande à Jean Nouvel, dont la carrière ne fait que commencer, de concevoir un projet d’extension de la Fondation Cartier. Cet édifice ne vit jamais le jour, mais ce fut le début d’un dialogue au long court entre Cartier, La Fondation Cartier et Jean Nouvel.

Quand la Fondation Cartier décide finalement de s’installer à Paris, boulevard Raspail, dans le quartier Montparnasse, c’est à Jean Nouvel qu’elle demande de concevoir son nouvel édifice sur le site de l’ancien American Center. Après l’Institut du Monde arabe, il s’agit de son second projet architectural parisien. La Fondation Cartier inaugure ce nouvel édifice conçu par Jean Nouvel en 1994. Avec ses majestueuses galeries de verre donnant sur le jardin alentour, le reflet des arbres, des plantes et du ciel sur les multiples baies vitrées de la façade, le bâtiment déroute le visiteur tout en l’immergeant dans un environnement paisible et naturel. La transparence, l’effacement des frontières entre intérieur et extérieur donne au visiteur l’impression tenace d’un bâtiment évanescent.

L’architecture de la Fondation Cartier donne le ton de sa programmation artistique. Les artistes sont invités à concevoir des expositions temporaires in situ en dialogue avec l’édifice. Son programme d’exposition visionnaire s’inspire de son architecture innovante pleine de possibilités créatives. À l’image de son architecture, ouverte sur le monde qui l’entoure, la programmation de la Fondation Cartier aborde toutes les disciplines artistiques, du cinéma aux arts visuels en passant par la science, la mode et la musique. L’adaptabilité définit à la fois l’architecture de Jean Nouvel et la manière dont la Fondation Cartier conçoit et produit ses expositions.

D’une exposition à l’autre, chaque artiste pose un nouveau regard sur l’édifice, laissant à sa guise l’espace complètement ouvert sur le monde extérieur ou le refermant totalement. L’unicité de la Fondation Cartier réside dans la possibilité offerte à ses artistes de se réapproprier l’espace à chaque nouvelle exposition.

Cette collaboration dans la durée entre Jean Nouvel et la Fondation Cartier témoigne de son engagement renouvelé auprès de sa communauté d’artistes. Nul doute que Jean Nouvel continuera d’accompagner la Fondation Cartier dans ses futurs projets.

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List of Famous Paris Buildings & Structures

List of the famous landmarks that make up the Paris skyline, listed alphabetically with photos when available. Paris architectural landmarks as well as other major buildings, dwellings, and other structures in Paris are included on this list. Information about these Paris buildings is included on this list, such as when the building first opened and what architectural style it falls under. List includes both new buildings in Paris and older historic landmarks.

The list you're viewing is made up of many different buildings, including Centre Georges Pompidou and Eiffel Tower.

This list answers the question, "What are the most famous buildings in Paris?"

25 Rue Franklin

Agoudas hakehilos synagogue, arab world institute, arc de triomphe, arc de triomphe du carrousel, arènes de lutèce, basilica of the sacré cœur, cœur défense, saint-jean-de-montmartre, eiffel tower.

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• # 5 of 104 on The Top Must-See Attractions In Europe

Front de Seine

Grande arche, halle aux blés, hôtel alexandre, hyatt regency paris etoile, jussieu campus, les invalides, les olympiades, louvre pyramid, louvre staircase, les mercuriales, luxembourg palace, maison de verre, maisons jaoul, marly-les-grandes-terres, musée d'orsay.

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Musée du quai Branly

Notre dame de paris.

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Orgues de Flandre

Palais bourbon, palais garnier, panthéon, paris, parc des princes, paris mosque, paris, 1 rue rabelais, pavillon suisse, pullman paris montparnasse hotel, préfecture des hauts-de-seine, rotonde de la villette, sainte-chapelle, stade olympique yves-du-manoir, stade pierre de coubertin, théâtre des champs-élysées, toll houses, paris, tour carpe diem, tour la villette, tour initiale, tour montparnasse, tour super-italie, tour triangle, tours de levallois, tour sans fins, tuileries palace, villa jeanneret, tours société générale.

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Lists and galleries of some of the most famous, interesting, and beautiful buildings around the world and throughout history.

Paris Without End (1959-1965)

20 March 2015

Artworks in order of appearance: The Val de Grâce seen from the Observatoire Garden, before 1961;  Tour Saint-Jacques and Chatelet column seen from the Café at the corner of quai de la Mégisserie, before 1961;  Café Le Select seen from La Coupole, before 1961;  The glasses on the stool in the studio, before 1961;  Sculptures in the studio VIII, before 1961;  Annette nude standing in front of the fireplace, rue Mazarine, c. 1964;  The bar at Chez Adrien (III);  Paleontology and compared anatomy gallery at the Museum of Natural History, Paris I, before 1961. Giacometti Foundation Collection, Paris.

Giacometti: Early Works

Organized in collaboration with the Giacometti Foundation, Paris, the exhibition explores Giacometti’s prolific life, most of which the artist led in his studio in Montparnasse, through the works of his early period as well his late work, including one unfinished piece. Devoted to Giacometti’s early works, the first part of the exhibition demonstrates the influence of Giovanni Giacometti, the father of the artist and a Swiss Post-Impressionist painter himself, on Giacometti’s output during these years and his role in his son’s development. 

Giacometti & the Human Figure

Giacometti worked nonstop on his sculptures, either from nature or from memory, trying to capture the universal facial expressions.  

Giacometti’s Final Works

Giacometti was selected for three important retrospectives at the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery in London and the Louisiana Museum of Art in Denmark, all of which were a great success. 

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Morphosis and their friends in Paris...

Tell me what you think: http://dev2.batiactu.com/diapo/899_exposition-des-10-projets-pour-la-tour-phare-a-la-.php

I think I've forgotten my French GCSE

ooooooh.......OMA and their cantilevers! thanks for the link, I hadn't seen any of the other entries!

in all seriousness, that Foster facade looks rather familiar...

yeah, it does. None of them look any good, imho.

As usual, my preference is for the wibbly one with strange bits and the thingumy at the top. Always fun to judge a bunch of architect's skyscraper proposals ;-)

i dont really mind the HdM, if the depth of the mesh could be inhabited

It's far-and-away the best entry

They all look like projects from my fourth year high rise design studio.

the morphosis project is so... manly... seriously, it looks like an erect penis.

My faves are Mayne and Kuksas.

Mayne's is by far the most interesting. But the all of the designs are boring! Just another extruded form with a fancy skin. Rem's design is the only conceptual building that somewhat implies an unique experience but on the other hand is intenionally Miesian (get over your man-crush Rem!). Is there any hope for the reinvention of the tower? Is there somehow we can collectively stop comparing penis sizes?

The Nouvel and Koohaus projects are very 50s/60s in aesthetic. Particularly Rem with the photo treatment. I like it, but I hope we do not all begin retreating to retro just when things are getting interesting.

Nouvel project = the eye from lor

Not everything that looks elegant, clean and straight is miesian... OMA's tower tries to break the current building code of la Defense, to allow more threedimensional freedom in future projects (which shall follow until 2015) and thereby create unedited experiences. It's not a mere site extrusion any longer, as it shifts from a f.....up site to a perfect plan... Like Nouvel a lot Goes with the ugliness of the environment and is defenitely a "projet phare" don't know what's moving though, that seems a bit to much...(could actually be an OMA i guess...). HdeM is kind of beautifull, now that's a site extrusion... I am wondering though if they could really achieve this nice transparency over 35 meters of depth...(c.f. Bibiliotheque de France, Perreault) fuksas looks completely out of scale to me and doesn't seem any interesting, please elaborate on that... I love Foster, could be there since ever... nice ctrl+c job for a person a week I guess... as side note, nouvel's tour sans fin was designed for a site just opposite the ringroad from this one...

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Another fine pickle

T he nearly completed Torre Agbar shoots up from the architectural indifference of the Glories district of Barcelona like some vertiginous crystal fountain. This seems appropriate: the eye-catching tower is the new headquarters of Agbar (Aigües de Barcelona), the company charged with running the city's water supply, as well as its sewerage and other civic activities including health care provision, vehicle inspection and tax collection.

This, though, is not what will interest most British visitors to the Catalan capital. They will surely think that Norman Foster's media-stealing Swiss Re tower, aka the gherkin, in the City of London, has been miraculously uprooted and replanted beside the Mediterranean.

At first glance, the two conical skyscrapers do, indeed, appear to be twins. But get closer to the Barcelona tower, and the differences reveal themselves. Designed by Jean Nouvel, architect of the jewel-like Institut du Monde Arabe and Fondation Cartier in Paris, the shimmering 31-storey, 144m (474ft) Torre Agbar is shorter, narrower and half the volume of Swiss Re. Where the structure of the London tower is an exposed and gleaming diagonal steel grid, Torre Agbar's is a thick concrete shell wrapped in a skin of profiled aluminium sheeting and a diaphanous blouse of glass louvres. While Swiss Re is hemmed into a tight City of London site, cheek-by-jowl with Colonel Siefert's Tower 42 and Richard Rogers' Lloyds Building, the £91m Torre Agbar overlooks a broad roundabout where Avinguda Diagonal meets Carrer Badajoz, and soars over a sea of piecemeal low-rise development.

A blaze of colour, Torre Agbar is Foster's tower on holiday. It looks wonderful at sunset as the reds, oranges and blues of its inner skin catch the sun and blaze through a myriad of tiny glass screens. In a certain light, the tower really does look as if it might be made of water, or light or fire. This is the tower the French architect, far from apeing Foster, has been trying to build for many years. At the end of the 1980s, Nouvel proposed a skyscraper the height of the Eiffel Tower in the guise of a chameleon-skinned glass cylinder rising from the brute concrete, steel and glass banality of La Defence, the monumental office quarter brooding at the western end of the Champs Elysees. The building would vanish ethereally from sight as it merged into the sky. This glorious conceit, or optical trick, was named "Tour Sans Fin": in theory you would never be able to make out where it stopped and the sky took over.

Sadly Nouvel never did get to build the Tour Sans Fin, yet here in Barcelona he has captured some of the promised beauty of that magical design. By sheathing the Torre Agbar in a sparkling skin that captures, reflects, refracts and toys with light, he makes the building seem far more delicate than it really is: this is the tall building artistically reconsidered.

It is also a surprisingly delightful addition to the Barcelona skyline, which boasts fewer than a handful of tall modern buildings. Down on Carrer de la Marina in the Villa Olimpica are the 154m-high Hotel Arts, designed by Bruce Graham of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and the matching Torre Mapre, also completed in 1992, by Inigo Ortiz and Enrique Leon. Dwarfing them, high on Tibidabo Hill, is the 288m Torre Collserola (1992), a communications tower designed by Norman Foster. The central tower of Gaudi's expiatory temple of the Holy Family - Sagrada Familia - will dwarf them all when complete in a future as unseeable as the top of Nouvel's Tour Sans Fin would have been.

Nouvel has conjured an office block for a public utilities company into something as special as one of the prickly towers of the Sagrada Familia itself. The plan of the building, although interesting for being elliptical, is pretty straightforward: floor after floor of offices. Even the cone at the top shrouds nothing more exciting than eight floors of free-standing offices rather than the Ken Adam-style restaurant and bar at the top of Swiss Re in the City of London.

Even though the building, engineered by Robert Brufau and Obiol Moya, promises to be frugal in its use of energy, and offers no fewer than 4,400 opening windows - a novelty in the age of the hermetically sealed, germ-laden, foul-breathed downtown office block - it is its remarkable skin, that will draw public attention. Nouvel is a master of surface design. The abiding memory visitors have of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris is of the buildings's extraordinary south-facing wall: between sheets of glass, exquisite metal irises in the guise of traditional Islamic patterns open and close like human eyes to control the intensity of daylight entering the building. Here, in one act of design sorcery, art, architecture, history and technology come together.

Meanwhile, the Fondation Cartier performs another of Nouvel's disappearing tricks: this gallery is almost transparent, rising gently behind a sequence of screens that confuse our notion of where structure begins and ends, of what is substantial and what is simply a trick of light. More recently, the Cultural and Congress Centre (1999), on the lakeside at Lucerne, Switzerland, shows this master of translucency at his best. Lapping water and parades of boats are reflected from aluminium panels flanking three separate structures housed under one vast, sweeping plane of a roof. As you approach the shore by boat, the building emerges almost ethereally from its mountain backdrop, becoming distinct only as you come in close.

The least ethereal aspect of Torre Agbar is its dense concrete core, from which the steel and glass cone emerge, as if freed from its weight, above the 25-storey line. This solid core promises to make the building not just secure, but economical in terms of energy consumption. The concrete will absorb heat in summer and retain it in winter. Nouvel has created a building that is at once practical, solidly down-to-earth and, despite its scale, soaring, lightweight and - on certain days, in certain lights - lyrical.

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Doha High Rise Office Tower

• Doha, Qatar
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Development in Qatar has taken an original turn by placing significant emphasis on culture; the declared goal of this shift is to make Qatar, and Doha in particular, the cultural pole of the Gulf region. The National Council for Art, Culture and Heritage, under the chairmanship of H.E. Sheik Saud al-Thani, is planning a large scheme featuring cultural buildings, such as museums and libraries, in which pre-eminent architects and designers have been invited to participate.  This redevelopment will reshape the bay of Doha beginning with a landscaping project for the Corniche and including a series of remarkable buildings that are destined to be symbolic landmarks along the coast.  Located between the new city center and the Corniche on the north side of the bay, Jean Nouvel’s tower will take its place in this new landscape.

Jean Nouvel has long questioned the traditional, orthogonal, central-cored, curtain wall scheme for high rise buildings.  Since his project for the Tour Sans Fin he has often explored the concept of a circular-plan tower with a peripheral structural system that allows for open, better-lit spaces with more control over interior lighting and abundant views onto the landscape. This concept, currently being implemented in Barcelona’s Tour Agbar, finds a new elegance in Doha. The Doha Tower is a cylindrical volume that measures 45 m in diameter.  It is crowned by a dome that ends with a light tower at 231.50 m. The steel and concrete structure follows a diamond shaped grid that bends along the virtual surface of the cylinder. The façade uses a double skin system. The exterior skin is composed of four “butterfly” aluminium elements of different scales and evokes the complexity of the oriental moucharabieh while serving as protection from the sun. The pattern varies according to the orientation and respective needs for solar protection: 25% towards the north, 40% towards the south, 60% on the east and west. The internal layer is a slightly reflective glass skin that completes the solar protection. Lastly, a system of roller-blinds can be used if needed. Each floor offers panoramic views of the Gulf on the east, the port to the south, the city to the west, and the coast and desert to the north. The tower is accessed from a landscaped garden that gently slopes towards a large lobby under a canopy of glass. The vegetation and glass canopy overlap so as to blur the distinction between nature and the man-made environment. An atrium rises to the 27th floor, 112 m high. This slim, shimmering, silver laced silhouette on the horizon is certain to become a landmark — a beautiful symbol for the Corniche of Doha.

Olivier Boissière

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Je m’appelle Titus Prime. J’ai treize ans depuis moins de vingt-quatre heures et je suis le plus jeune ambassadeur de Babel 232. Peut-être même de toutes les tours-planète ! Mais un léger problème vient contrarier mon ascension. Accusé à tort, me voilà contraint de fuir des ennemis redoutables... Jusqu’où dans cette tour sans fin ? Je l’ignore encore. Heureusement, je peux compter sur Rukia, une nomade, pour m’aider à leur échapper.

Entre complot, trahison et machination, la course effrénée de Titus et Rukia à travers les étages de Babel 232 leur réserve bien des surprises... jusqu’à l’impensable !