Jean Nouvel: The Film Director of Architecture

Jean Nouvel was born in 1945 in Fumel, Lot-et-Garonne, in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France. A French architect, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Throughout his career, he has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the 2005 Wolf Prize in Arts, and the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize. He stands as one of France's most prominent contemporary architects.

Nouvel masterfully integrates steel and glass, using light as a key design element to create captivating works. He views architectural design not as an isolated act of creation, but as a process shaped by external forces—natural, urban, and social conditions.

Nouvel once stated, "The future of architecture is not architectural." This isn't a dismissal of architecture's past or potential, but rather a belief that architecture should no longer be seen as an independent discipline governed solely by its own internal rules. The context of society and the urban fabric is far more complex than any set of simplistic internal principles.

For Nouvel, neither historical nor modernist perspectives offer a truly viable starting point today. "We cannot create an architecture for the future," he explains, a notion underscored by the technological and cultural revolutions—and evolutions—of the twentieth century. Similarly, he finds the pursuit of an ideal building or an ideal urban plan absurd, considering it a fundamentally misguided approach.

The very idea that we can impose an ideological order on architecture is flawed. It's unsuitable for buildings in the modern city, where fixed, inherent rules no longer exist. In our current era, architecture articulates the grammar of urbanism and the logic of social life. The multi-layered experience of modern life and the relentless flood of information make any single, simplistic viewpoint impossible. The forces shaping buildings have fundamentally changed; they are now driven by external factors.

This doesn't render architects powerless, but it certainly means they can't do anything they please. As Nouvel suggests, this reality presents a dual challenge for architects. First, they must focus on the unique specificity of each project—a building is created for a particular purpose, in a specific location, within a distinct contextual environment. If internal rules no longer suffice, architects must look elsewhere to find guiding principles.

For Nouvel, this means engaging with the rich diversity of contemporary culture. He has summarized this by saying architectural problems stem from the substance of the world around us and how people perceive it, not from architecture's own autonomy. He credits Le Corbusier as the first to reveal the potential of applying ideas from other manufacturing processes—like grain silos or airplanes—to architecture.

Modernity, in Nouvel's view, persists not as a "Corbusian" style, but as a sensitive attitude towards emerging new phenomena. Architects must be adept at capturing these evolving characteristics. This is evident in how he treats building façades differently based on their urban context. For instance, the rear façade of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris differs from its front, adapting to the neighbouring district with a pattern of predominantly horizontal and vertical lines. Similarly, the east and west façades of the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre feature different coloured metal surfaces to harmonize with their respective surroundings.

To Nouvel, the process of architectural design—from initial concept to completed construction—resembles the making of a film. This cinematic approach is visible in many aspects of his work.

Just as a film frame isn't an end in itself but a medium, a carrier of information understandable on multiple levels, so too is Nouvel's architecture a system of signs. This symbolic language isn't expressed through traditional façades. A building, for him, should feel as if it has grown from its context, representing its specific place and time. Its architectural language must therefore be drawn from various other sources—culture, society, other media—anything but architecture itself.

Living in an era of increasing visual culture, Nouvel finds the language of film, television, and the internet particularly relevant for architecture today. This system of signs isn't merely about decorative surfaces, as seen in the well-known Institut du Monde Arabe. Such symbolic meaning is just one layer of a larger structural significance; the system itself should be multi-layered, abstract, and dynamic.

Just as we can appreciate a film in many ways—its aesthetics, movement, use of colour and language, narrative structure, characters—we can also appreciate a building through multiple lenses. Nouvel's work often seeks a synthesis between different, even opposing, assumptions and conditions.

Nouvel uses materials to express an intangible transparency, creating a strong connection between a building, its site, and its era. He responds to ambiguity with ambiguity, and to complexity with complexity. In buildings like the Institut du Monde Arabe, the interplay of light, shadow, and space creates a complexity that isn't artificially imposed by the architect, but demanded by the building's own nature.

Rather than favouring static, picturesque compositions, Nouvel prefers evolving, cinematic landscapes that change with distance, layers, and vantage point. Here, the camera has effectively replaced the easel. He uses light and space to design for the times.

In the Fondation Cartier building in Paris, the street-facing façade is an 18-meter-high transparent glass wall with minimal steel framing. This glass enclosure surrounds a garden, where preserved trees appear to grow right through the glass. Inside, exhibition and office areas are delineated using transparent and frosted glass as exterior walls, giving the entire structure a remarkable and ethereal appearance.

"Traditional architecture is based on fixed volumes," Nouvel says. "This overlooks the primacy of light—it's what allows us to see architecture! And it ignores light's possibilities and its incredible variety. For me, light is a substance, a material, a fundamental material. Once you understand how rich and changeable light is, and you feel its richness, your architectural vocabulary instantly becomes different, in ways many classical buildings never imagined."

"This makes a temporary architecture possible—not because of temporary structures, but because light constantly changes the building's form. It changes throughout the day and through the use of interior lighting. Harnessing the power of light is fundamental to my work. My buildings are often surrounded by five or six different sets of lights."

In numerous projects, from the Institut du Monde Arabe to the Lyon Opera House, he uses light to enhance architectural expression. In the Nantes Court of Law, he employs skylights to bathe the main courtroom in a downward flow of natural light, creating an atmosphere of solemnity and reverence.

Whether by day or by night, light brings his architecture to life.

The pictures are from the internet.