Jean Nouvel wins National Art Museum of China competition
25/07/2013.
[Beijing] China
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
Jean Nouvel (Ateliers Jean Nouvel) and Beijing Institute of Architecture Design (BIAD) have been officially declared winners by the jury of the international competition for the construciton of the National Art Museum of China [NAMOC] in Beijing, China, ending months of speculation.
A render for Jean Nouvel's NAMOC museum. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
The building's form is inspired by calligraphy. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
A section shows the building's interior plan. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
West facade of NAMOC reflecting the landscape. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
View of the facade from the iView of the facade from the imperial axis. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).mperial axis. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD). Click above to see larger image.
View of the west facade with the "Bird's nest" at the end. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
The winter hall is articulated around a skylight window with the shape of an inverted cone. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
The autumn interior garden in the north. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
View of the north facade imitating stone. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
West facade of NAMOC reflecting the landscape. Image by Ateliers Jean Nouvel / Beijing Institute Architecture Design (BIAD).
Jean Nouvel paraphrases the Chinese artist Shi Tao (1642-1707): “A single line is the source of everything in existence.”
The calligraphy is the base of writing and this is the signature used by Jean Nouvel to design the project for the NAMOC, which has been finally declared as the winner proposal for the competition. The project has followed three stages since 2010, with the participation of seven chinese teams and thirteen renowned foreign offices. The design sets to hold on a strong and recognizable identity, the image of a booming country looking for reinforce their cultural picture. Its location in the north-south axis, which goes from the Forbidden City to the Olympic facilities, confirms the symbolism of the museum, which wants to link their antique collections of art and the contemporary ones, to which the Nation have been continuously collaborating.
Plancha de caligrafía china que sirvió de inspiración para el proyecto.
"I wasn't to change my religion so fast" says Jean Nouvel. "So that, it was necessary to immerse in the old culture of the country. I spent the first year and a half of immersion trying to understand the master's caligraphy, that one year later has turned into something obvious, the dialogue, the exploration, translation, synthesise and materialize the spirit of a civilization." it seems obvious that Jean Nouvel has became an enthusiast of the "qi", the spiritual approach of a basic principle that includes the whole universe and connects people and things between them and has got no equivalent in the West.
The landscape integration has been achieved in collaboration with Gilles Clément, creating in the area a red tonality garden with maples and gingko bilobas. Besides, the plantations has been put around the ponds which have the shape of a big dragon.
Nouvel was shortlisted for the project last year along with architects Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry, but despite rumours suggesting Nouvel had won, there has been no official word on the outcome until now.
The competition to design NAMOC was conducted over three rounds, from December 2010 to July 2012. Earlier this month, Gehry unveiled his shortlisted design, which would have featured a facade of translucent, stone-like glass panels. Gehry's team created full-scale mockups of the panels in Beijing as part of the development process.
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JEAN NOUVEL
Jean Nouvel, (born August 12, 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008.
Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, in 2008, for his work on more than 200 projects, among them, in the words of The New York Times, the "exotically louvered" Arab World Institute, the bullet-shaped and "candy-colored" Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the "muscular" Guthrie Theater with its cantilevered bridge in Minneapolis, and in Paris, the "defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric" Musée du quai Branly (2006) and the Philharmonie de Paris (a "trip into the unknown" c. 2012).
Pritzker points to several more major works: in Europe, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (1994), the Culture and Convention Center in Lucerne (2000), the Opéra Nouvel in Lyon (1993) , Expo 2002 in Switzerland and, under construction, the Copenhagen Concert Hall and the courthouse in Nantes (2000); as well as two tall towers in planning in North America, Tour Verre in New York City and a cancelled condominium tower in Los Angeles. International cultural projects such as the Abu Dhabi Louvre, the Philharmonic Hall in Paris, the Qatar National Museum in Doha, or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 in London.
In its citation, the jury of the Pritzker prize noted:
Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field. [...] The jury acknowledged the ‘persistence, imagination, exuberance, and, above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation’ as qualities abundant in Nouvel’s work.
Among his principal completed projects, we find the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Cartier Foundation and the Quai Branly museum in Paris, the Culture and Congress Center KKL in Lucerne, the extension of the Queen Sofia Arts Center in Madrid, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Philharmonic of Paris…
Among the projects currently under studies or under construction: the “53W53, Tour de Verre” integrating the extension of the MoMA galleries in New York, the residential towers “Le Nouvel” in Kuala Lumpur, “Anderson 18” and “Ardmore” in Singapore and “Rosewood” in São Paulo, the office towers “Hekla” and “Duo” in Paris, the cultural complex “The Artists’ Garden” in Qingdao or the National Art Museum of China NAMOC in Beijing… The design of the Louvre Abu Dhabi began in 2006 with Jean Nouvel’s Partner Architect Hala Wardé.
