French Architect Wins Pritzker Prize

By ROBIN POGREBIN

NEW YORK TIMES
March 28, 2008

Jean Nouvel, the bold French architect known for such wildly diverse projects as the muscular Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the exotically louvered Arab World Institute in Paris, has received architecture's top honor, the Pritzker Prize.

Mr. Nouvel, 62, is the second French citizen to take the prize, awarded annually to a living architect by a jury chosen by the Hyatt Foundation. (Christian de Portzamparc of France won in 1994.) His selection is to be announced Monday.

"For over 30 years Jean Nouvel has pushed architecture's discourse and praxis to new limits," the Pritzker jury said in its citation. "His inquisitive and agile mind propels him to take risks in each of his projects, which, regardless of varying degrees of success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture."

In extending that vocabulary Mr. Nouvel has defied easy categorization. His buildings have no immediately identifiable signature, like the curves of Frank Gehry or the light-filled atriums of Renzo Piano. But each is strikingly distinctive, be it the Agbar Tower in Barcelona (2005), a candy-colored, bullet-shaped office tower, or his KKL cultural and congress center in Lucerne, Switzerland (2000), with a slim copper roof cantilevered delicately over Lake Lucerne.

"Every time I try to find what I call the missing piece of the puzzle, the right building in the right place," Mr. Nouvel said this month over tea at the Mercer Hotel in SoHo.

Yet he does not design buildings simply to echo their surroundings. "Generally, when you say context, people think you want to copy the buildings around, but often context is contrast," he said.

"The wind, the color of the sky, the trees around - the building is not done only to be the most beautiful," he said. "It's done to give advantage to the surroundings. It's a dialogue."

The prize, which includes a $100,000 grant and a bronze medallion, is to be presented to Mr. Nouvel on June 2 in a ceremony at the Library of Congress Library in Washington.

To read the complete article, click on the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/31/arts/design/31prit.html?_r=2&ref=arts&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

OTHER LINKS:

Jean Nouvel slide show: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/03/28/arts/20080331_PRITZ_SLIDESHOW_index.html

Guthrie Theatre audio slide show: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/03/09/theater/20080309_GUTHRIE_FEATURE.html#section1

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