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A Genius in Bed: Jean Nouvel explains his innovative ideas

United Kingdom Architecture News - Jul 03, 2015 - 09:41   4745 views

A Genius in Bed: Jean Nouvel explains his innovative ideas

Photograph by Dominique Issermann; image courtesy of nymag.com 

A world-renowned French architect Jean Nouvel spoke to Justin Davidson from New York magazine and he talked about his latest projects including the Louvre Abu Dhabi, National Museum of Qatar, National Art Museum of China, and the 53 West 53rd Street "MoMA Tower"in New York, Philharmonie de Paris to the specific approach to architecture underlying the creative ideas on how they are shaped in his mind.

“My approach to architecture is tied to my European culture, my French upbringing, and my Parisian trajectory,” he says, studying the label on a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “But I think it’s essential to merge an insider’s knowledge with an outsider’s perspective. Otherwise, you take too much for granted, and you fail to see what’s possible. Sometimes when you think you know a city, you don’t really know it at all.” Nouvel has a tendency to speak in gnomic generalities, but what he seems to mean is that intimacy with Paris has given him the grounding to work anywhere. Weaving around the constraints of history prepared him to be inventive with New York’s byzantine zoning code, and now, after nine years of dithering, his supertall 53 West 53rd Street, informally known as the MoMA Tower, is finally under construction. His “Parisian trajectory” has also propelled him into unexpected orbits. Ever since he came out of the blue to win a competition in 1981 for the Institut du Monde Arabe on the Left Bank, he has been a de facto interpreter of Islamic architecture. And not just in the West: When Qatar needed a national museum, it turned to him. Now he’s about to extend that idea to New York, designing an Islamic museum on Park Place, a successor project to the notorious “ground-zero mosque.”......Continue Reading

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