Art in Japan>Architecture & Design>Jean Nouvel

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Jean Nouvel

by John McGee

Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, 1981-87, with Gilbert Lezenes, Pierre 
Soria and Architecture Studio (Photo: ©Georges Fessy/Centre Pompidou)

Dentsu's new headquarters in Shiodome is a shape-shifter. From Ginza, you see the narrow edge of its svelte, tapered wind-foil form. From Hama Rikyu Gardens, it's a 48-story frosted glass curtain blotting out the other office towers dumped nearby. 

French architect Jean Nouvel (b. 1945) has been designing such attractive, practical and hard-to-describe structures for many years. He's won numerous accolades, from the Islamic-oriented Aga Khan Prize (1989) to the Praemium Imperiale (2001), Japan's Nobel of the arts. Nouvel means "new" in French and with each project, that's what the client gets—a novel solution to local design problems. Enormous panels along the roof of the CLM/BBDO headquarters outside Paris (1988-92) rise like insect wings to let in air and light. Tall concertina doors at the Nemausus apartments in Nimes (1985-87) fold flat when open, making living rooms and balconies one space. 

This exhibition, organized in 2001 by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, looks at Nouvel's work in two dimensions: slides, inkjet prints, videos and a few drawings. Rather than giving a holistic view, the show emphasizes the architecture's effects, especially the drama of natural light pushed through layers of glass and painted across reflective metal surfaces, as if referring to something the architect once said, "My scenarios are based on light, matter and mystery." 

Temporary Guggenheim Museum (unrealized), Tokyo, 2001 (Photo: ©Didier
Ghislain, ©ADAGP Paris & JVACS, Tokyo 2003)

The first room is a dizzying hall of mirrors with a Plexiglas floor and black walls overlaid with glass. Hundreds of small color transparencies showing parts of Nouvel's buildings are framed in black. With no information about what or where they are, it's like stained glass windows made from sleeves of found slides. Multiple slide projectors clatter overhead, throwing similarly anonymous images higher up. 

Black walls continue throughout the exhibition, but the show becomes less disorienting. Huge color inkjet prints under individual spotlights showcase projects currently under construction and recent unbuilt designs. 

One unrealized project of note was a design for a branch of the Guggenheim Museum to be built in Odaiba, a man-made island in Tokyo Bay. An artificial mountain planted with deciduous trees completely covers rectangular gallery boxes. With seasonal changes, the entire hill turns from spring's pink sakura (cherry blossoms) to autumn's red koyo (fall foliage). 

In a narrow hallway projection room, a long array of wall-sized slide projections show the freshness of older projects, like Nouvel's career-making Institut du Monde Arabe (1987) in Paris. Rather than use mini-blinds to control the light, the windows are covered in a breathtaking mandala-like grid of metal irises that open and close like an array of camera shutters. 

Slide projection room inside the Jean Nouvel exhibition (Photo: John McGee)

A few drawings and video impressions line the back hallways. Here also are dozens of photos of the architects, designers and others who have helped realize the projects. Despite the single name on the marquee, architecture at Ateliers Jean Nouvel is collaborative. 

One thing the curators forgot, however, is that the only place buildings are experienced as flat images is on the holo-deck of Captain Picard's Enterprise. Though they use the terms "filmic" and "vanishing architecture" to explain Nouvel's work, scale models or architectural plans would have helped better elucidate the actual experience of moving through the built spaces. That absence, plus Japanese-only didactic panels, makes this feel more like a photography exhibition (though a good one). Skip the equally unhelpful exhibition catalog and research the informative Ateliers Jean Nouvel website before and/or after you visit (www.jeannouvel.fr/). 

Upstairs in Project N is a solo show by Mitsue Makitani. Though she overindulges her ego, her decorative topographies in foam and colored paper are worth a look.

This exhibition was held Dec 2003-Jan 2004 at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Hatsudai, Tokyo, Japan.

©2007 John McGee

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