Nouvel lost a much-publicised battle to remove his
name from it, citing 26 incidents of non-compliance
with his original scheme and claiming that his client
had martyred design. But its ‘monomaterial aesthetic’
nevertheless achieves his aim of ‘harmony with the
light of Paris, the ray of sun in the grey clouds, the
rain… An architecture of measured and composed
reflections created by a subtle relief of cast aluminium
paving that draws Escheresque patterns on the ground.’
Concert programmes are beamed on to part of the
Philharmonie’s skin, almost modestly compared to
the way in which the diaphanous facades of his earlier
(2009) Danish Radio Concert House in Copenhagen
– ‘a mysterious parallelepiped that changes under the
light of day’ – become huge screens at night.
Projection takes yet another form at the Galeries
Lafayette in Berlin where Nouvel has reinterpreted the
atrium with glass, mirror cone volumes, one rising from
street level, a second smaller cone going underground.
The corner of the building is ‘dematerialised’ to give
passers-by a view in. Messages are projected, distorted
anamorphically, across the mirrors and on to two large
screens, each on a busy shopping street.
The cones also provide the building’s offices with
natural light. ‘The floors around the cones are dotted
with transparent glass that becomes gradually more
opaque,’ says Nouvel. ‘Halfway between abstraction
and figuration, artificial and natural light, we want
to create an interplay, a subtle, seductive decorative
setting that explores the revealed and the hidden,
darkness and light, the intelligible and the perceptible.’
Nouvel is ‘precarious,’ says Gehry. ‘He tries things and
not everything works’, but as the Priztker committee
wrote a decade ago, ‘his inquisitive and agile mind
propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which,
regardless of varying degrees of success, have greatly
expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture’
– including the practice of dematerialisation. ‘The
career of an architect does not always follow a linear
path. In the case of Jean Nouvel, we particularly admire
the spirit of the journey: persistence, imagination,
exuberance and, above all, an insatiable urge for
creative experimentation.’
Kersalé’s scheme for Nouvel’s Torre Agbar: ‘Light inserts itself
between the tower’s double skin, one made of coloured plates
and the other exterior one, of glass blades. It re-enhances the
existing colours on the first skin’
‘The ambiguities of matter and light
make the Agbar tower resonate against
the Barcelona skyline day and night,
like a distant mirage’
– Jean Nouvel