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Syndicate
The Daring, Dialectic Jean Nouvel
I’m ashamed to admit it: I had never heard of architect Jean Nouvel before I went to hear him speak at the National Building Museum on Tuesday, one day after he was awarded architecture’s most prestigious prize, the Pritzker Prize, at the Library of Congress. I wasn’t sure what to expect. I am a fan of old architecture, the stories it tells, its position as a witness to history, its representation of the era that produced it. However, all of my preconceived notions about modern architecture were shattered like beams of light refracting through the mesh-like roof of Nouvel’s Louvre Abu Dhabi. His breathtaking work is symbolic, resonant, and at least as vocal as anything that came before it.
above: Arab World Institute, Paris
Nouvel himself speaks rapidly, in a heavy, lilting French accent that at times made his words hard to understand. But as he said, it’s better to see architecture than discuss it, anyhow. The cornerstone sentiments came through: his preoccupation with “a question of specificity,” that is, how to create something new and vibrant that has local, anthropological roots; also the importance of controversy, tension – dialectic, as he puts it – in buildings.
His work spoke volumes. There’s the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, a meandering, verdant homage to primitive art, its interior covered with intricate graffiti by Aboriginal artists, its exterior shrouded in vegetation and trees.
Credit: paris.moleskinecity.com
The Louvre Abu Dhabi in United Arab Emirates is a domed, spaceship-like structure seemingly woven out of gossamer fibers in a creative haste.
Credit: dezeen.com
There’s Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater, a primary-colored rotunda whose intricately tiled façade suggested faint portraits – ghosts, according to Nouvel – who come and go as the light changes.
Credit: Amanda Ortland/Guthrie Theater via nytimes.com
And there’s Torre Agbar, a towering, glittering obelisk in Barcelona whose powerful shape makes it the centerpiece of the city.
Credit: blogdetourismo.com
“Every project is a kind of adventure,” Nouvel says. Listening to the collective gasp of the packed auditorium every time he pulled up a new slide, it’s clear the buildings are adventures for the rest of us, too.