genius of Jean Nouvel, The

Carnegie, Jul/Aug 2002 by Gangewere, R J

"HIS WORK SHINES THROUGH AS HALING BOTH CLARITY RHD FINESSE, ORIGINALITY AND LYRICISM."

In Pittsburgh on March 14 for the announcement of his appointment as architect for the expansion of Carnegie Science Center, Jean Nouvel spoke with Robert J. Gangewere, editor of CARNEGIE magazine. As they sat on the balcony of the fifth floor of the Science Center, they overlooked the downtown on a beautiful, sunny afternoon.

Nouvel, at the peak of a distinguished career that has brought him many honors for his work in Europe, has recently expanded his practice in the United States. He received the prestigious Gold Award from the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2001, which noted that during the present era of architectural blandness and imitation, "His work shines through as having both clarity and finesse, originality and lyricism." Nouvel blends high technology with aesthetic originality. In Paris his Arab Institute on the bank of the Seine delights visitors with a multilayered and often transparent interior. This includes a glass wall with metal irises in the guise of traditional Islamic patterns, opening and closing like

the human eye to control the intensity of light entering the building. On Berlin's historic shopping street, the Friedrichstrasse, his Galeries Lafayette feature giant, sleek, glass cones to define the volumes, one cone rising several stories upwards from street level to the top of the building, and a smaller, inverted cone dropping down from street level past two underground shopping and two parking levels. His 1980s design for an endless tower (Tour Sans Fin) in Paris was never built-an office building that rose dramatically into the sky to disappear visually into the clouds in a haze of colored, transparent glass.

In Pittsburgh, dressed comfortably and completely in soft black leather, and smoking his Cuban cigar out-of-doors during a break in the meetings, he contemplated the Pittsburgh panorama before him. In soft-spoken tones, he reflected on the challenge of this assignment, which he had said earlier he did not think he would win, given the length of the competition.

Nouvel's English is good enough to communicate what he must. He searches sometimes, with the help of his two French advisors, for the English equivalent of the French expression. He describes downtown as a presque isle (near island), and he seeks complementarite (compatibility) between the Science Center and Heinz Field in their relation to the Pittsburgh Point.

RG: You spoke about the genius of the place, having a feeling for this site and the identity of Pittsburgh.

JN: For me what is incredible at this site is to be on the river and in this place, because we have the whole skyline of the hills in front of us. There are outlines against the sky. You can read every branch of every tree, and it is very, very precise. Against the horizon you see the cars, like in a panorama from a Western movie, which would have horses and cowboys.

The sequence of bridges is very strange.. exactly like what you see with a zoom lens. All the bridges are seen on the same plane, and you don't have the feeling of depth. It is a flat screen.

But below the horizon are the two railways, and the cars, and the trucks on the bridges, and the barges on the river...all in circulation. This panorama is for me very important in relating the Science Center to downtown, and in capturing the feel of the downtown. The situation is very different when you are down on the river. Up here, above the submarine, you feel the complexity. You have the feeling you are in a dialogue with the scene, and so I try to catch that. There are so many sensations. I like so much the park at the Point, in the foreground..it is a nice place.

The genius of the place is its identity, what you cannot find in another place. Downtown is like a presque isle. This is a fantastic situation. If you create a building where you have this feeling, you become very sensitive to your relationship with downtown.

But it is a difficult situation if you don't find the right scale for the height of the Science Center. It is important to organize a building which has a facade over the existing building, and to create a kind of big Oriental screen in front of the city, in contrast with the stadium. For this reason I want to go over the river with the cantilever. With the cantilever you have an identity different from that of the stadium, but it is complementary. This situation is very strategic.

RG: Is that screen like a contemporary idea of the cinema, of using the city as visual experience, and of projecting images?

JN: The screen is a two-way screen. When you are inside of the screen it is transparent, and you can interact with the bridges and the downtown. When you are outside, during the day, you will see something very vague, with the people and the few lights inside, very mysterious. During the night, because we have the fabric curtains, we can project movies or slides on an urban scale. Your subjects are all the themes of modernity and the sciences.