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French architect Jean Nouvel has been awarded the
prestigious Royal Gold Medal for Architecture. The honor
was announced mid-May by the Royal Institute of British
Architects (RIBA).
According to the RIBA
announcement, "Nouvel has maintained the highest of
architectural standards and has consistently brought
excellence to design in a wide range of cultural and
commercial buildings, in his native country and abroad."
Jean Nouvel is simply a wonderful designer. In an age of
blandness, imitation, or doubt, his work shines through
as having both clarity and finesse, originality and
lyricism.
In broad terms it will be
referred-to as "high-tech" and in similarly broad terms
he himself regarded as a "high-profile" personality. On
close inspection, however, his work has a certain
romanticism and intricacy, and he is a very warm,
enthusiastic, and even naughty person. Even his ex-wives
remain his friends!
A student at the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts in Paris at the time of the 1968 uprising
when politics took over from design, this eager young
man up from the Garonne went to work for Claude Parent,
who, with his friend the philosopher Paul Virilio,
inspired Jean to bypass the tiresome nature of
Postmodernism and the subsequent Revival-Modernism that
were the orthodoxy of Paris in the 1970s and 1980s.
Nouvel was active in setting up experimental and
organizational groups: "Mars," the Syndicat de
l'Architecture, and the Paris Biennale. A glance at his
international friends is revealing: Bernard Tschumi, Ron
Arad, Will Alsop, or Future Systems, for example: also
technical lyricists. In such friendships he has proved
to be intellectually and personally generous.
In his buildings, his
ability to render the layering of glass, the undulation
of a building's profile, or the weaving of filtered
screens can only — and rarely — be matched even in
Japan. In the Arab Institute in Paris, his first seminal
building, the delicacy of mechanical screens is
contrasted with the clarity of a sharp, glass diagram.
Also in the mid-1980s he
created one of the most poetic essays in metal: the
deceptively modest Hotel de Saint-James near Bordeaux.
Here, as in many of his hotels and housing projects,
often made on tight budgets, he combines ingenuity in
planning and extraordinarily winsome detailing with an
unforgettable figuration. His work is haunting.
The Opera at Lyon consists of a giant, filtered barrel
that is superimposed on the massive 19th century base
and achieves a completeness of the total building that
would daunt any lesser designer.
Such élan can be found in
the sweeping form of the conference center of Tours, or
the shimmering glass matrix of the Fondation Cartier in
Paris that introduces a play between the delicacy of
fine strips of metal, the layers of surrounding trees,
and the continual trompe-l'oeil potential of reflected
glass.
It is probably the
Cultural and Congress Centre of Lucerne that has
convinced even the doubters of Nouvel's superb abilities
with both overall form and detail manipulation. Three
structures are aligned perpendicularly beneath a huge
horizontal plane that seems to float beneath earth and
sky and finishes in a huge overhang of 150 feet (45
meters). The sweep of this is
highlighted by the sharp line of the edges of the sail
and by the elegantly flat aluminum panels which reflect,
70 feet (21 meters) from the ground, the vibrations of
the lake.
With structures emerging
from Prague, Minneapolis, and Japan, Nouvel confirms his
position as a consistently impressive architect. |
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