Lighting - Issue 03 June 2018

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’