Jean Nouvel

Contents

1. A career built on screens and surfaces
2. Reflection in Chelsea, a rain of light in Abu Dhabi
3. Water as a mirror on West Avenue

Jean Nouvel, the French architect of Monad Terrace, appears on the roster of design firms that Michael Stern’s JDS Development Group has worked with, a roster that also takes in SHoP Architects, Roman and Williams, Gachot Studios, Studio Sofield, Woods Bagot and Field Operations. Nouvel works in concrete, steel and glass like anyone else, but the material that runs through his best known buildings is light: how much of it a wall lets in, how it breaks on a facade, how it falls on a floor. This entry follows that one material through four projects, from a wall in Paris to Monad Terrace.

A career built on screens and surfaces

Nouvel received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2008. Canadian Architect’s report of the announcement traces his reputation to the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, finished in 1987 as one of President Francois Mitterrand’s grand public projects, and lists the work that followed: the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in 1994, the Lyon opera house in 1993, the cultural and conference center in Lucerne in 2000, the Agbar Tower in Barcelona, the Branly Museum in Paris and the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. By then his office had designed well over two hundred projects in dozens of countries, among them a 75 story tower planned next to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.² He was the second French architect to receive the prize.

The jury’s language is useful here. It praised his persistence and imagination and, in the phrase Architect Magazine quoted, his urge for creative experiment.¹ It also said that for Nouvel there is no style set in advance: each project starts from a reading of culture, location, program and client. Nouvel put it in his own words, saying his interest lay in an architecture of the present, working with the techniques and materials available now rather than reworking historical references.²

The Institut du Monde Arabe shows what that meant in practice. Architect Magazine describes a series of diaphragms set into one exterior wall that open and close to regulate the sunlight reaching the interior, a device admired for being both elegant and new.¹ It is a wall that behaves like the iris of a camera. The same article looked ahead to the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a group of buildings under a vast pierced canopy, as evidence that Nouvel had returned to the Arab world with the same interest in filtered light.¹

Figure

How a random facade was made buildable

window frame types

32

angles of glass rotation

4

kinds of reflective glass

3

directions of rotation

4

Reflection in Chelsea, a rain of light in Abu Dhabi

In New York, the idea turned from filtering light to breaking it up. At 100 Eleventh Avenue in Chelsea, facing the Hudson, the architect’s own project text describes a curved front made of facets set at different angles, like the eye of an insect, catching reflections and throwing back sparkles, while the rear walls keep to the brick textures of the neighborhood.³ eVolo counted some 1,700 panes on that front, each tilted to its own angle, and noted that on the black brick back the windows only look random; each was placed to frame a particular view, such as the Empire State Building. The same report notes that the glass does practical work too: full height windows bring daylight deep into the apartments and operable sashes let in fresh air, part of a bid for LEED certification.⁴

A facade like that has to be built by someone. Front, the facade consultant, explains that the seemingly random pattern was reduced to 32 frame types, four angles of rotation, three reflective glass types and four directions of turn, then assembled into large panels and installed as a unitized curtain wall. Rule based digital models let the team test versions quickly, and visual and performance mockups checked the result before it went up.⁵ Randomness, in other words, was designed and then counted.

Abu Dhabi reversed the problem. There the aim was to let sunlight fall through a roof in visible shafts. Transsolar, the climate engineers, say Nouvel wanted a rain of light under the museum’s large perforated dome, inspired by sun filtering through palm leaves in an oasis. Making it visible meant studying the physics of crepuscular rays: contrast, dust and humidity, the spread of sunlight, the smallest workable opening and reflections at the edge of the dome. Dust and humidity could not be scaled down in a model, so the team calibrated artificial fog against a partial full size mockup, and then confirmed the size and spacing of the perforations with a full scale test on site. The museum opened in November 2017.⁶

Figure

Two ways of admitting light

	Institut du Monde Arabe	Louvre Abu Dhabi
City	Paris	Abu Dhabi
Completed or announced	Completed 1987	Announced by 2008
Device	Diaphragms set into one exterior wall	A large pierced canopy over a group of buildings
What it controls	How much sun reaches the rooms	The light falling on the spaces beneath it

Water as a mirror on West Avenue

Monad Terrace, as Forbes described it, carries the idea to Miami Beach, and what may be said of it here comes from that one approved source. Writing in Forbes in July 2018, Lena Katz reported that the building, then under construction on West Avenue facing Biscayne Bay, placed a manmade lagoon between its two towers to hold the buildings’ reflections. Nouvel called the design a reflection machine and likened its mesh facade to the skin of a fish, describing light bouncing off the bay and then caught again by the water below.⁷

Set beside the earlier work, the pattern is plain. In Paris the wall opens and closes against the sun. In Chelsea the glass scatters the river’s light back at the city. In Abu Dhabi a roof sifts it into beams. In Miami Beach, as Forbes described it, water returns it. The jury’s point about context holds for all four: the material stays the same, and what changes is the place it is asked to answer.²