Ateliers Jean Nouvel won competition to design a giant opera house in Shekou Peninsula, a site overlooking  Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (the Greater Bay Area), stretch out along the waterfront in Shenzhen, China.

Surrounded by water on three sides, the fluid design, named Light of the Sea, will have 220,000-square-metre, with a 2,300-seat opera hall, a 1,800-seat concert theatre and an 800-seat venue for operettas, and a multi-functional theater with a total of 400 seats. The project also includes other cultural spaces as well as a stage design and production center, among its many facilities.
The International Architectural Design Competition for Shenzhen Opera House announced the selection of the proposal Light of the Sea submitted by Jean Nouvel as: “A masterpiece where music meets the sea”, and adds "the design doesn’t adopt the conventional enclosed form of opera houses, but it integrates the building into the coastline, showcasing a visionary public cultural landmark."

Jean Nouvel has created public buildings, such as Philharmonie de Paris, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and National Museum of Qatar.

The Competition adopted a “global invitation + open selection” mechanism to select 17 teams our of over 100 registered applicants. These teams representing 14 countries and regions brought together the world’s top-notch architects.
 

Description of project by Ateliers Jean Nouvel

The light of the sea

Shenzhen has always been in harmony with the South China Sea. It used to be a fishing village. Its coastline has always been a promenade, once as popular as it was poetic. The promenade will be enhanced. The arrival of the Opera House will create a long sequence along a coastline that has already been diversified over a stretch more than a kilometre long…

This almost square-shaped precinct, the Opera House neighbourhood, will be part and parcel of the music and the sea on three of its sides. It will be protected by a huge glass hall to substantiate the fact that the Opera House itself and its auditorium belong to the China Sea. The Opera House’s auditorium will be visible through the spacious foyer leading to it.

On the northern side it will open completely on to the music precinct. This will involve a large loggia opening on to terraces teeming with life, seaside terraces that will evoke the sea, thanks to lying beneath the lights coming from the sea of glass that will house them. The sea will be both around you and over you. This explains more clearly why the main foyer has to be made of a noble, precious and luminous material that spells the meeting of sea and music and light.

Mother-of-pearl is a bright and lustrous light-element that looks wet when dry. As such, mother-of-pearl will feature in the Opera House auditorium in an irregular, rhythmic way, highlighting the curve of the balconies or the acoustic geometries of the walls. Using the lustrous white reflections of a nacreous material will be a concrete poeticisation of the meeting of the sea and the auditorium and concert halls of the Opera House. It will be an indication of the diverse uses of the halls and foyers in its rhythmic marking of the different interiors.

At Shenzhen, then, inside as well as out, the twin image of mother-of-pearl shell and wave will open on to the everchanging light of the sea.

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Architects
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Ateliers Jean Nouvel. Architect.- Jean Nouvel. Associated Architects.- Samuel Nageotte. Architectures. Architectural Team.- AJN China (Chen Chen, Ran She).
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Project team
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Architectes Competition AJN.- Tiphaine Dugast, Stacy Einsenberg, Alix Gasser, Pierrot Lankry, Anne Traband, Anh Viet.
Project Manager.- Aurélien CoulangeS.
SNA.- Tatiana Branco, Gilles Colomb, Claire Gaspin, Lucia Giudice, Elen Le Dez.
Scenography, concert hall.- Julie Parmentier, Stefan Zopp. Landscape.- Yinan Du, David Euvrard, Isabelle Guillauic. Engineering & Cost Consultant.- Andrew Davids. Engenieering Consultant.- Thornton Tomasetti, RFR. Scenography.- Michel Cova, dUCKS. Façade Consultant.- Ken Y.Luo + GDAD.
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Collaborators
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3D Modelling.- Julie Soulat, Sna (Marion Autuori, He Li, Katherine Qian, Iléana Savescu).
Images 3D.- Sabrina Letourneur, Tanguy Nguyen, Ala Rassaa.
Graphic Design.- Amélie Besvel, Marlène Gaillard, Marie Maillard, Eugénie Robert, Léo Taiariol.
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Client
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Shenzhen Municipal Bureau of Culture, Sports, Tourism, Radio and Television, Planning and Natural Resources Bureau of Shenzhen Municipality, Bureau Publics Works of Shenzhen.
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Area / seats
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Total surface area.- 220,000 m²
Public service and cultural and creativity area: 23,300 m²
Stage design and production center.- 12,000 m²
Performer apartments.- 20,000 m²
Offices.- 5,000 m²
Opera Hall.- 2,300 seats
Concert Hall.- 1,800 seats
Operetta Hall.- 800 seats
Multi-functional theater.- 400 seats.
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Dates
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2021.
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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.
 

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