Dubai Opera, Jean Nouvel

Building future memories...

An allusion to music, to rhythm... a reference to the rhythms of the past... an invitation to discovery... a mystery programmed.

"We are here above the water, at the far end of the Creek. The visitor encounters an « inhabitant » who belongs to the spirit of the time, belongs to the time inscribed in the place. It acts as a witness, a guardian, a protector and, above all else, a vision across the city and its future.Its scale is such that we can not confuse it with a vulgar hotel or an office building: it is proud, sure of its aura across the land.It can not be decoded in a simplistic or univocal manner.Its image changes with angles of view, with the lights, but it also belongs to the atmosphere, to the thickness of the air. It reveals the light. It impregnates its shadow in the water."

Jean Nouvel

Dubai Opera

Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Photo: © Jean Nouvel

Everything is image, Jean Nouvel

"Everything is image, architecture itself is image, we see it with our eyes and it is primarily a visual creation. Now I am interested in abstract/figurative relationship and I feel that today it is very modern to use figurative image as architectural languague. All evolution towards de-materialisation, towards miniaturisation and the complexity of materials, because all takes place in interfaces and very complexity of the planes."

Jean Nouvel
French Architect

Modernity, Jean Nouvel

"All types of architectural language are always linked to particularities and specifics. The first of which is era. Thurs, my architectural language is based on today's notion of modernity. For me, modernity today for me is primarily a question of materials, which automatically implies interplay with ligh, it also concerns architecture in relation to time, to the very principle of eternity and moment...it manages to bring out a building's strength."

Jean Nouvel
French Architect

La Philharmonie de Paris, Jean Nouvel

Architect Jean Nouvel has won a competition to design the new Philharmonie de Paris building at Parc de La Villette in the French capital, it due to open at 2012.



Jean Nouvel
La Philharmonie de Paris
Paris, French

Photo: © Jean Nouvel

Abu Dhabi Cultural District, Jean Nouvel

The micro-city requires a microclimate that would give the visitor a feeling of entering a different world. The building is covered with a large dome, a form common to all civilizations.

Nouvel's scheme for a "classical museum" features a huge, flattened dome over an open-air arrangement of smaller buildings. It's like a village, shaded with a space dome.

Jean Nouvel architects
Abu Dhabi Cultural District

image © tropolism

Torre Agbar, Jean Nouvel

“This is not a tower. It is not a skyscraper in the American sense of the expression: it is a unique growth in the middle of this rather calm city. But it is not the slender, nervous verticality of the spires and bell towers that often punctuate horizontal cities. Instead, it is a fluid mass that has perforated the ground – a geyser under a permanent calculated pressure.

The surface of this construction evokes the water: smooth and continuous, but also vibrating and transparent because it manifests itself in coloured depths - uncertain, luminous and nuanced. This architecture comes from the earth but does not have the weight of stone. It could even be the faraway echo of old formal Catalan obsessions, carried by a mysterious wind from the coast of Montserrat.

The uncertainties of matter and light make the campanile of Agbar vibrate in the skyline of Barcelona: a faraway mirage day and night; a precise marker to the entry of the new diagonale that starts at Plaça de las Glorias. This singular object becomes a new symbol for an international city.”

Jean Nouvel
Torre Agbar
Barcelona, Spain
image © scholarsresource / casaportale