Get Cartier! How Jean Novel turned an old Paris department store into a museum to rival the Louvre

"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. Retractable rails around the perimeter prevent visitors from plummeting to their doom Defiantly weathering critical opprobrium, Nouvel is an auteur who revels in creating architecture that is always theatrical and never the same."

Jean Nouvel has been a defining presence in Parisian architecture since the early 1980s. The Institut du Monde Arabe established his reputation with a metallic facade incorporating mechanical lenses to regulate light. The Philharmonie provoked controversy and was likened to broken paving stones and authoritarian iconography, prompting Nouvel to boycott its inauguration and call the finished project sabotaged and counterfeit. The Fondation Cartier now occupies a remodelled 19th-century Haussmann building across from the Louvre, where the exterior remains classically stone while the interior has been radically reconfigured. Nouvel pursues theatrical, variable architecture and compares his practice to filmmaking across cities.

Read at www.theguardian.com