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Reflections are used as a contextual connecting device not just on facades, but dramatically, on the underneath of great overhangs (at Lucerne, and the Reina Sofía Museum, for example) with a mirage-like effect, as reflecting pools in the sky. With multiple skins, puncturing, patterning, and filtering, surface planes take on veiled and overlaying reflections, until they start to merge specificity of the place with its surroundings.

Such connections made with light reflect the broad concern in Nouvel's work as to how buildings connect to sites and surroundings. He uses shape regularly to connect, employing both echoing and enfronting geometry. At the IMA, the curve of the building along the roadway echos it and the river, a streamlined parallel emphasized with horizontals in the glazing. On the other side of the IMA building pair, the rectangular facade and its square=patterned glazing grid enfronts the courtyard and city. Curving steps between the street and plaza floor, joining the city plaza and the riverside, express the connecting seam.

At the Quai Branly museum, a similar curving landform carrying the shape of the adjacent Seine river steps down along the riverside site edge , while the building gesture also again follows the sweep of the river (as at the IMA), with Branly's rougher kind of horizontal rhythm expressed in the protruding, syncopated gallery boxes.

In addition to such outdoor artfulness, the quality of inner space and interior light, and the creation of meaningful variation in space in large buildings — giving local significance to particular spaces, while maintaining the sense of relationship to the structure as a whole — are crucial to Nouvel's achievement of a total architecture.

The results of such unified interior and exterior experiences are perhaps systematically more satisfying than, for example, Gehry's overtly sculptural outside-oriented buildings, where the exterior seems to be almost everything, leaving us looking at a sculpture, and living in an odd box, or Calatrava's sculptural structures, where the skeleton itself is the thing — a rich device, in that it allows development of both interior and exterior around it, but a device that sometimes leaves us with the feeling of inhabiting a sculpture, more than a place.

Nouvel at his best seems to give us sophisticated interlayered places. His sculptural essence is crafted of a weave of place and space that seems to invite human participation.

The Guthrie Theater is another project mentioned in the citation. The Pritzker Jury says, "The iconic Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota both merges and contrasts with its surroundings. It is responsive to the city and the nearby Mississippi River, and yet, it is also an expression of theatricality and the magical world of performance." To us, the new complex, replacing the earlier groundbreaking Guthrie Theater by Ralph Rapson, succeeds (particularly as seen from the side looking back toward downtown) as a symbolic grain factory connecting to river with an enormous promenade spout, a beautiful celebration of the history of a Midwestern U.S. hub city.

A total architecture today should really also encompass, in addition to such context-connecting icon, ensemble buildings, like 40 Mercer Street in New York, and adaptive reuse, where Nouvel really shines as at the Lyon Opera, where the vault allows the 18th century facades to retain their primacy, while deftly encompassing a far larger internal opera house, and at the stupendous Gasometer in Vienna. He also plays with historical allusions on various time scales, as the glazing exoskeleton at Cartier in Paris nods to the Pompidou Center, and the Lyon Opera, especially in front elevation, nods to its grand Parisian predecessor.

Theatricality

The Pritzker Prize committee writes, "Jean Nouvel's projects transform the landscapes in which they are built, often becoming major urban events in their own right. His unique approach, driven by the specificities of context, program, and site has proven effective in numerous successes around the world."

One such success, a building that first brought Nouvel international recognition is the Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA) in Paris, where one of its facades is made entirely of mechanical oculi operated by photoelectric cells that automatically open and close in response to light levels. The French critic Alain de Gourcuff said of it, "The overall effect is at once highly decorative in a Middle Eastern way and projects state-of-the-art electronics."

Commissioned in 1981 as one of the first Grand Projects initiated by President Francois Mitterand, IMA was completed in 1987 and consists of a museum, a library, temporary exhibit spaces, children's workshops, a documentation center, an auditorium and a rooftop restaurant.   >>>

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SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE The Cultural and Congress Center in Lucerne, Switzerland, features a deeply cantilevered roof. Photo: Philippe Ruault Extra Large Image The Cultural and Congress Center by Jean Nouvel stands on the shores of Lake Geneva. Photo: Philippe Ruault SUBSCRIPTION SAMPLE Cultural and Congress Center ground-floor plan drawing. Image: Ateliers Jean Nouvel Extra Large Image Nouvel's Fondation Cartier opened in Paris in 1994. Photo: Philippe Ruault Extra Large Image The Cartier Foundation's glass facade echoes that of L'Institut du Monde Arabe. Photo: Philippe Ruault Extra Large Image Cartier Foundation ground-floor plan drawing. Image: Ateliers Jean Nouvel Extra Large Image Cartier Foundation section drawing. Image: Ateliers Jean Nouvel Extra Large Image The glass walls of the Cartier Foundation building blur the distinction between indoors and out. Photo: George Fessy Extra Large Image Jean Nouvel's 2006 Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, replaced an earlier building by Ralph Rapson. Photo: Roland Halbe Extra Large Image A large cantilevered wing marks the entry to the 2006 Guthrie Theater. Photo: Pete Sieger Extra Large Image   Click on thumbnail images to view full-size pictures.