Saturday, September 13, 2008
An Hour With Jean Nouvel And Some Of His Work
Director Beat Kuert produced a one hour television documentary in 1998 on architect Jean Nouvel that is now available through Netflix. It served me as an interesting hour about regarding this architect and his work, but as with a great jazz set by a master or a lecture about a major writer or historical figure, I left engaged, enlightened, but scope and time limitations did not create a comprehensive portrait of the man and his art and his vocational calling.
Architecture is a subject that can be well suited to film, especially when the architect is essentially a visual artist. And even more so because Nouvel's work has a very high experential and even cinematic element to it. He even says in the film, "I have tempted by filmmaking," and he mentions having friends who are involved in filmmaking. He seems envious of the filmmaker's ability to transform their work late in the process with editing. Still, he finds similarity in the joy of being able to make decisions and positive changes when onsite contingencies and opportunities come up in a construction site. In architecture, Nouvel says you are bound by materials. And also in the film he emphasizes the most important aspect of his work is at the conceptualization stage. "Design stage is what counts. A building is a cultural statement. You can't get it wrong."
The film covers only a few of his many, many projects. But the ones that Kuert includes seem to be illustrative of what makes this architect unique. The Luzern Culture and Congress Center in Lucerne, Switzerland is a multipurpose building with an exceptionally large cantalevered roof that overhangs over a lake. It also uses windows light and colors to give someone moving through the building a cinematic kind of experience. The film also spends much time giving us a filmic interpretations af other noted Nouvel masterworks including the Cartier Building and the opera house of Lyon which are used to show his work with glass and how he works to create structures that have a relationship of integration with the environment around it.
Nouvel believes that too much architecture is inert. He believes in light and getting things down to the essentials, seeing this as a reflection of modern life and design. Of this latter point, he gives the television as an example. When televisions came out we had a small picture in a huge box. Nowdays there is basically no box or frame at all, especially with LCD type technology. We are left with the thing itself.
As mentioned, this film is nowhere comprehensive about the man or his voluminous output. Nouvel's website lists over forty projects between 2005 and the present. Nor is there any biographical or personal information included in Kuert's film. It does show Nouvel as a man of nearly perpetual motion, not really having an office or desk of his own, but constantly moving between associates and projects. The latter he visits in a cloud of cigar smoke.
I was intrigued by this man and his vision and some of the insights into his process. He talked about he uses Michel Foucault's principles of discontinuity, specifity, reversal, and exteriority to solve design problems. He also states that ""The more we want to make things simple the more simple things become complicated." And there seems to be a kind of summarized certainty to his statement that "Architecture has a lot to do with technical expression."
I enjoy films that introduce me to folks like Nouvel and appreciate how DVD publishing and the Internet can give us the opportunity to explore and discover individuals of vision and accomplishment. I hope in this case, before I travel to a major European city (although he has created many projects in the US) I will check to see if there are any works of Nouvel in the vicinity. Because it is evident that his works are not just to be viewed, but experienced.
posted by well-executed buffet at 11:30 AM
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