Come what may, Jean Nouvel will always have Paris. The City of Lights has been the stage and stomping ground of French architecture’s vieux terrible since the early 1980s. Yet the building that first made his name – the Institut du Monde Arabe, a glittering, delicate, metallic creation inset with mechanical lenses to regulate light – is a lifetime away from the bemusement that met his last Parisian project, completed a decade ago.
That was the ill-starred Philharmonie, a gargantuan trophy concert hall, described in the Guardian as resembling “a pile of broken paving stones” and “a greatest hits mashup of dictators’ icons”. Nouvel may well concur, since he boycotted the building’s inauguration, dismayed by budget cuts and design tweaks (“value engineering” as it is known in the trade), describing his project as “sabotaged” and the half-finished concert hall as “counterfeit”.
