Ufficio da abitare / Offices for living by Jean Nouvel
01/04/2013.
iSaloni 2013. [MIL] Italy 09-14/04/2013
metalocus, PEDRO NAVARRO
metalocus, PEDRO NAVARRO
The 52nd edition of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile – at the Rho Milan Fairgrounds from 9th to 14th April – will feature a project conceived by Jean Nouvel.
Jean Nouvel will explore contemporary building concepts within a dedicated area in SaloneUfficio’s pavilion 24, informed by a rejection of cloned spaces, enclosed spaces and serial repetitiveness, suggesting new cohesive formulas for tackling the domestic and international markets to greater effect.
Jean Nouvel built his first office building, the CLMBBDO advertising agency on the outskirts of Paris, in the late Eighties, giving full rein to the key strands of his vision of the workspace : mobility, conviviality, pleasure, fun, with offices opening onto both the inside and the outside of the building.
“In 30 or 40 years time we will be stunned to see just how unliveable most of today’s offices really were,” says Jean Nouvel. “Grotesque clones, standardisation, totalitarianism, never the merest hint of being pleasurable to inhabit.” This concept of pleasure in office living is precisely what is driving “Project: office for living.” It is a quest for new materials and new technologies for creating comfortable, effective, user-friendly and ecologically-aware environments. We need to inhabit our offices the way we inhabit our homes and our cities, because we spend just as much time in the workplace as we do in our own homes, and everyone has a right to small pleasures – light regulation, emplacements, views, the right of expression through furniture and objects. “We can work, and will increasingly work, in apartments, in our own apartments, in converted warehouses” says Nouvel. “If we were to work in office skyscrapers, we would have to invent spaces impregnated with generosity, receptive to each and everybody’s universes and personalisations.”
“Project: office for living” will showcase several different work environments light years away from urban segregation and functional cloning. As Jean Nouvel says, the architect’s job is to interpret the technical, cultural and social changes of the age in which we live and to express them poetically in a quest for freedom.
This then paves the way for five completely original scenarios illustrating just how out-dated the traditional office already is.
The event will also include a small compendium of furnishings and structures created by great architects, a homage to Jean Novel’s heroes, and a VIP lounge, to which four eminent designer friends of Nouvel’s have been invited: Ron Arad, Michele De Lucchi, Marc Newson and Philippe Starck.
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.