Jean Nouvel

Architecture’s most prestigious prize finally honours Jean Nouvel for a career of architectural experimentation.

Jean Nouvel, bald and in black, looks like everyone’s idea of an architect. He acts the part too: formulating ideas in bed, vacationing in the South of France, and dressing only in black (except in summer, when he wears only white). Thankfully, his embodiment of architecture’s great clichés is matched by his contribution to architecture’s contemporary vocabulary. Living up to his image, he is widely recognised as one of the most influential living architects, and routinely included amongst a select group of immensely successful superstar architects.

News that Jean Nouvel was to become this year’s Pritzker laureate was consequently received with the same sense of anti-climax that greets the death of a movie star slipped from the spotlight: genuine emotion overcome by muted surprise that it hadn’t already happened; a quiet recognition that the event was so obvious that it barely needed to occur at all.

In a list of laureates that includes Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid, Renzo Piano, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Herzog & de Meuron, Tadao Ando and, most recently, Richard Rogers, Nouvel has long been a conspicuous absence. He may well be the last of last century’s great “starchitects” to have gone unhonoured by the profession’s most prestigious prize.

So startling was his omission that the most pressing question is perhaps not “why did he win?” – the enormity of his contribution has never been in doubt – but “why did it take so long?” By way of response, Frank Gehry – 1989 Pritzker laureate, former member of the Pritzker jury, and Nouvel’s close friend – told the New York Times: “He’s precarious. 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.” Even the jury citation seems to echo this hesitation, commending him for his risk-taking, “regardless of varying degrees of success”.

This nagging uncertainty points to something fundamentally unsettling about the 2008 laureate’s oeuvre: Nouvel’s architecture does not cohere. To speak of his “body of work” is always vaguely embarrassing, undermined at every turn by its sheer diversity. Post-Pritzker reports that have suggested his work might be united by the architect’s use of light are a case in point. Certainly, light features strongly in his designs – but is it really possible to suggest that the low, moody lighting of the Musée du Quai Branly and the elegant, evasive transparency of the Cartier Foundation are somehow synonymous?

To be helpful, the descriptions must be specific: it’s possible, for instance, to observe an interest in dappling, in the aesthetic interplay of light and shade, that links the Institut du Monde Arabe to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. To do so recognises something significant in Nouvel’s aesthetic, but also excludes the bulk of his buildings. Properly applied, broad, all-inclusive design principles such as “light” and “context” are more likely to splinter an oeuvre than to unite it, and particularly when that oeuvre is as disparate as Nouvel’s.

If such incoherence is embarrassing for the critic, it is no doubt more so for a prize that claims to honour an architect for their body of work in its totality, and whose selection criteria calls for consistency as well as quality. Nouvel’s work is characterised by iconic triumphs, from Paris’ elegant Institut du Monde Arabe with which he made his name in 1987, to Barcelona’s monumentally phallic Torre Agbar. But it is, as Gehry notes and the jury implies, also studded with oddities and curiosities, buildings that fail spectacularly or that polarise critics. It’s difficult to have an opinion on Nouvel, byword that he is for a sprawling set of architectural games and experiments.

And yet, for all that the Pritzker jury has hesitated, this “precariousness” is precisely what makes him such a compelling and successful figure in contemporary architecture. Nouvel seems to expose his peers by contrast, showing up the narcissistic promotion of a single style that is the unacknowledged trademark of many of architecture’s biggest names. While architectural practice profiles almost always emphasise context over conformity and clients’ needs over house style, in practice this kind of humility is rare. Nouvel’s success lies in his genuinely experimental resistance to the twin temptations of convention and style, and in his unusually sincere interest in the great architectural commonplace of the “client’s needs”.

Another way of saying this, of commenting obliquely on the unevenness of Nouvel’s body of work, is the honour paid in recent media releases to his attention to “context”. They may not share a unifying style, but his buildings nonetheless seem to capture something essential about the cities in which they’re built and the functions for which they’re made. Praised by the Pritzker jury for expanding “the vocabulary of contemporary architecture”, Nouvel’s buildings, as abstract and meaningful as language, might equally be commended for emphatically proving that architecture is a vocabulary of sorts: as intelligible and evasive as words.

His buildings pay tribute to their contexts in their subtle, oblique embodiment of the stories we tell ourselves. The chord they strike is often an unnamed resonance with what we already know, or think we know, of a city, a site or a building type. The metal lenses of the Institut du Monde Arabe, unmistakably referencing Arab latticework, are the most famous of such references.

But such allusions are fundamental to all Nouvel’s work and often precede the design itself. New York’s Tour de Verre’s dizzying skyward trajectory follows the 1920s sketches of Hugh Ferris. These sketches, central to our way of seeing the modern city, shaped our most iconic urban skylines, from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis to DC Comics’ Gotham. The Tour de Verre thus becomes an allusion to a nascent myth, to the moment where New York’s skyline fragmented into popular imaginings: it becomes the archetypal skyscraper on an archetypal skyline. Similarly, the controversial Musée du Quai Branly, designed to display indigenous arts of Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas, captures the French public’s persistent fantasies about the “heart of darkness”, the murky, erotic exoticism of its former colonial subjects.

In this sense, Nouvel’s contextualism might be described as postmodern, in a more sophisticated, more understated and more theoretical sense than is generally meant by the term in architecture. Nouvel’s designs are far from the gaudy referentiality of postmodern architecture; but his interest in the language of architecture, in its implication in the construction of cultural narratives and in the idea of a place as it rubs up against the experience of the place – in all these underlying concepts, Nouvel is heir to the structuralist and poststructuralist thought of his formative years.

Unabashedly “conceptual”, uncompromisingly experimental, Nouvel is that rarest of figures: an architect who is genuinely innovative, not just once, endlessly repeated – as in the grand pioneering triumphs of Gehry’s quirky angles or Hadid’s sinuous curves – but over and over again. Innovating anew in each project, Nouvel’s failures may be more spectacular, but his contributions are also more thoroughgoing, more varied and more profound. Honouring Nouvel at last, the Pritzker jury seems to be recognising what contemporary architecture hopes it has become: original but contextual, relevant but transcendent, daring but responsive, conceptual but beautiful. At his peak, Nouvel unites these contradictions; and where he fails, he does so exposing the difficulty and the nobility of architecture’s most interesting and most honourable aspirations. +

1 The Tour de Verre in New York, to be erected next to the Museum of Modern Art, tapers towards the sky, reflecting Nouvel’s aesthetics of “dematerialisation”. 2 100 11th Avenue’s spectacular façade, seen from the Hudson River, will be constructed from 1700 glass panels, each set at a slightly different angle, to produce a shimmering effect. 3 The Louvre Abu Dhabi has been designed as a mini-city whose weblike dome and waterside location will be used to regulate the museum’s internal temperate. 4 Inside the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the webbed dome filters the light, providing protection from the elements and encouraging cooling breezes from the water. 5 Nouvel’s extension of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid places three independent pavilions around a central courtyard, all of which is covered by a lacquered aluminium canopy. 6 The Philharmonie de Paris’ entrance will use gently sloping ramps to create an intermediate space between the philharmonic hall and its surrounds.