Jean Nouvel to receive Pritzker Prize
The architect's finest designs have both practical and emotional appeal
Jean Nouvel is an architect who gives irrationality a good name. The 62-year-old Parisian, who today will be named the 2008 winner of the Pritzker Prize, the field's top honor, has always been interested in pursuing designs that bring the practical craft of building and the dream world of the subconscious into alignment.
That alignment is rarely airtight. It doesn't always follow the dictates of logic or the bottom line. But it also creates remarkable and occasionally sublime architectural moments.
Nouvel's finest work, unabashedly theatrical, makes the case that his profession's most important contribution to the larger culture is its ability to use the most unyielding and practical of materials and forces -- steel, glass, sheetrock, physics -- to elicit genuine emotion among visitors. In certain projects by Nouvel the arrangement of those materials, paradoxically enough, seems to cause the physical world to recede, giving ground to desire and memory. He has often compared himself to a film director, and the experience of walking into one of his buildings is not unlike entering a darkened movie theater.
When postmodern architects began to take command of the field in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they reintroduced historical ornament and decoration as a way to connect to the past. But Nouvel, despite his coming of age professionally in that era, is less interested in the past, as a generic and saleable idea, than in our individual and collective pasts. For him, the past is an intimate place.
His buildings look back without leaning on the crutch of old-fashioned detailing or specific historical references; instead, they are executed with blunt geometries and bold colors. They are concerned with the role of memory in architecture without passing over into nostalgia.
Straddling that line in architecture is exceedingly difficult to do, and in recent decades perhaps only Frank Gehry and Aldo Rossi have done it better. In fact, it is a phrase Rossi wrote about his own work that may sum up Nouvel's architecture best. Describing a floating theater he designed for Venice in 1979, Rossi claimed he was seeking "a place where architecture ended and the world of the imagination or even the irrational began."
Nouvel has been on the same quest. A case in point is his Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, which opened two years ago on the banks of the Mississippi River. Covered mostly in midnight-blue panels, the building is ungainly. It looks terrible in photos, a major liability in an age of architectural icons and image-making.
