Scenic as it may sound to speak in terms of “after Domus, the deluge”, this is not the way we like to think. And for sure this is not the way Jean Nouvel likes to think: two years after his eleven issues as Domus guest editor, he is living in blossoming mode, anything but a deluge, in full action at the epicentre of contemporaneity, the Paris of the imminent Olympics, the city of his debut and of his maturation as a designer and protagonist of several seasons.
There is where we met him, as he inaugurated a project with a very high Olympic content, the installation for Samsung, partner brand of the 5 circles for three decades now, on the Champs Elysées.
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The space immediately calls into question the city and its landscape: it anticipates an 80-metre-long pavilion that will take shape at the Rond-Point not far away, and is sandwiched between two storefronts that are difficult to ignore, i.e. Saint Laurent’s and Dior’s (with the latter directly monogramming an entire building). This is why, as Nouvel tells us, his architecture aims to “generate questions, rather than answers”, with an abstract blue façade, behind which the content cannot be seen. “You only see the abstraction, and the correspondences with the buildings; since there’s a small shop window next to it, it’s a bit like the proportion of a big façade – a small, big façade – with a tiny facade on the other side. It’s like fragments”.
It is more than forty years, in fact, since the transformations of Parisian urban space and Jean Nouvel’s trajectory started developing on the same track, from the era of the Grands Projets promoted by president Mitterrand, of which an icon such as the Institut du Monde Arabe is part, via the glazed non-façade of Fondation Cartier on boulevard Raspail and the green, deconstructed ones of the Musée du Quai Branly, up to the present day, where, with a certain leap in scale, it is more questions than answers that are thickening around the ever-changing Paris, earning the Olympic label for 2024 with no certain label for the years to come. “Paris’ greatest virtue is being Paris, is having been Paris for a long time” Nouvel says, “and having a heritage and specific characteristics that remain. Paris’s greatest flaw is that it doesn’t do it often enough, and doesn’t do it well. The priority would be for Paris to make the most of its era. Not always be on the back foot, doing little things. If you look at what has been done architecturally for the Olympic Games, it’s not much; and it’s significant”.
Paris’ greatest virtue is being Paris, is having been Paris for a long time and having a heritage and specific characteristics that remain. Paris’s greatest flaw is that it doesn’t do it often enough, and doesn’t do it well.
Jean Nouvel
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At a time when, the architect argues, ’there is virtually no creative architectural work”, apart from a few major cultural projects, linked to the great names of the art foundations, the Parisian scenario could once again be a laboratory, as it was for the nouvelle architecture française envisaged in the Mitterrand era, combining technological innovation, attention to heritage and a strong urban value of projects, but the conditions for this to happen lie in the proposals that will be made. French architecture, beyond being “new”, has been around for some time, Nouvel says, it “has left its mark on the world in the Gothic and other eras, which are linked to the transformation of Paris: Haussmann, of course, and all the architecture of the 19th century, which was so decried but is now back. So everything is about heritage at the moment. But heritage isn’t just a matter of preserving and removing dust: it’s about enriching it. If we have it, it’s to enrich it. It’s not just a matter of boasting about having been a great city”.
This is the direction in which the Nouvel of 2024 is working, with the project for the new location of Fondation Cartier in the 19th-century Louvre des Antiquaires on the rue de Rivoli, as with the return on one of his projects from long ago, a gallery on the quai Voltaire that the new owner wanted to renovate while maintaining the character of abstraction of the architecture in the collective and private spaces. “Architecture bearing witness to the era” the architect defines it. “You can do a lot of things, you can make programs, that’s one thing, but places are another. And improving the places in which we live, enriching them, that’s the role of architects”.
But heritage isn’t just a matter of preserving and removing dust: it’s about enriching it. If we have it, it’s to enrich it. It’s not just a matter of boasting about having been a great city
Jean Nouvel
O, the role of architects. For more than half a century now, any illusory storytelling about them having the power to demiurgically shape things, houses, let alone cities, has lapsed. The question shifts to their impact on the debate that can someway inform those shapes. A debate where magazines, for instance, should be playing their role – “A role for architecture magazines? There has to be one, because we need them. Everyone needs them” – but when it comes to the figures of those who design, everything starts to creak.
“The problem is that architects no longer exist. In other words, they no longer have any power”. The issue that Nouvel had already evoked when presenting his reflections for Domus in 2022, is a contextual one that spans several scales of professional thinking and acting: “The multiplication of urban development, the relocation of the territory, I would say, has led to a whole series of buildings being built that are no longer architecture, but a succession of clones that have cloned the entire planet. The few architects who try to work in an artistic dimension are generally sidelined because they have to work, so their fees are more expensive than others”.
But the ultimate perspective does not lie in the crucifixion to a fee as the ultimate gatekeeper to any agency for those who design space and thought at the same time, as the mission of architects could hopefully be defined: “The role of architects”, actually, “is becoming more and more vital, because it’s a cultural role that doesn’t just affect culture; culture is often the architect’s realm, but in the sense of a development of cities with a history; continuing that history is vital for future generations”.
Opening image: Jean Nouvel. Photo Giovanni dal Brenna