If the Louvre Abu Dhabi (LAD) was a bespoke suit and not a 64,000-square-metre, Dh2.4 billion construction project, then Jean Nouvel's most recent visits would definitely have been one of the final fittings. The project has reached a crucial stage where the architect's sign-off is required before further progress can be made, but every hour counts when there are less than two years to go before the museum is scheduled for completion.
Nouvel has come to Saadiyat to make a personal inspection of two elements in particular: a full-scale mock-up of a gallery – lighting, doors, windows and signage all require his approval – and another of a 25-metre-square, six-metre-deep section of the museum's bowl-like canopy, complete with its interwoven stainless steel and aluminium cladding.
"This is an interesting trip for me. For the first time, we can see the drawings adapted into matter [and] the end result is developing, like a photograph that develops gradually when soaked in water," he tells me.
"I am here to check a whole set of characteristics related to light," the 68-year-old explains, "and also the correspondence of sensations, which is the basis of my project."
At this stage the mock-ups are still drafts, but they offer the clearest indication yet of what LAD might look like when it is complete. For this reason, Nouvel sees them as vital tools in a design process that is ongoing. It's an iterative approach that allows the architect to fine-tune the details that will, for him, make the project a success, but it is a process that has the team responsible for delivering the project on time on tenterhooks.
On the afternoon we meet, Nouvel sits in the shadows of the empty library at his hotel. As another journalist once quipped, his powerful frame, shaved head and all-black attire give the architect more than a passing resemblance to Marlon Brando's Colonel Kurtz, but unlike the famously brooding actor, the architect is no prima donna. Nouvel may have been awarded with the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2008, his profession's equivalent of a Nobel, but he is patient and genial, crafting his statements carefully in French. His aim, as always, is the kind of eloquence that defines his best work, and he refuses to be rushed.
"I believe it is not possible to prefigure a dome by a drawing, which is why we have created this big mock-up," Nouvel explains. "We never see things entirely; we can see them only when they are put into reality, and this is the whole point of architecture. In fact, architecture can't be perceived or felt by means of pictures."
There are certain decisions that can only be made once construction is already under way. "There is no solution nowadays for large contemporary architecture projects without the fabrication of precise prototypes that allow us to make sure that our concepts can be realised," Nouvel insists. "This phase requires a high level of precision. There are many details that need to be controlled."
Chief among those details are the surfaces, colours and finishes of the 180-metre-wide canopy, a 7,000-tonne jigsaw composed of around 400,000 separate elements, that represents the most intricate part of an already complex project. It is also the most difficult part of the build. If it is realised correctly, the canopy will create ephemeral light effects that the architect hopes will become one of LAD's defining visual features. While its performance will undoubtedly dominate judgements about the museum's quality as a piece of architecture, assessments of LAD as a museum will also be forced to consider the quality of its collections in the light of what promises to be an architectural tour de force.
"We [will] walk around in the shade that is perforated by small holes," he says. "These small holes aren't what you see in a strainer; they're not just random holes that allow light in, it has to pass through a total of eight filters.
"Sunlight passes through two holes, then it is blocked by the third. But this soon changes as the rays move and we get spots of light that appear and disappear, enlarge and shrink … it's a kinetic effect that is visible to the naked eye because in 30 to 40 seconds you'll see that one spot is getting bigger and another is disappearing."
Crucially however, the canopy has another, more practical function. "What's difficult to understand," Nouvel explains, "is that the dome is perforated to create a microclimate." That microclimate will not only make life comfortable for the museum's visitors as they walk around its precincts – LAD is described by Nouvel as an "analogue of a traditional Arabian town" with shaded public spaces between its buildings – but it is also expected to make a vital contribution to the atmosphere inside the climate-controlled galleries.
"Inside these buildings, there are precious artworks, antiquities, drawings and paintings that must be all controlled and kept at a perfect temperature," Nouvel explains. "This must be exact and cannot be approximate, which is why museums cost so much. It takes a great deal of complexity and sophistication to fulfil these characteristics."
In an age when the output of an increasing number of "starchitects" has become instantly recognisable – there is no mistaking a building designed by Nouvel's good friend Frank Gehry, for example, or by Santiago Calatrava or Zaha Hadid – it has often been said that there is an absence of a recognisable design DNA in Nouvel's buildings.
In part, the disparate nature of Nouvel's output has been ascribed to what the jury of the Pritzker Architecture Prize described as the architect's "insatiable urge for creative experimentation". His lack of repetition can also be seen to result from a commitment to creating buildings that engage with their context. It's a position that places Nouvel in opposition to much of the architecture of this and the last century. His approach is the very antithesis of that employed by his contemporary, Rem Koolhaas, or historically by the modernist architects in the 20th century who worked in the International Style, as Nouvel explains when talking about LAD.
"My philosophy is that every project is different, but what I'm concerned about is that they should make sense in their respective contexts. This is a museum that has been designed for here. It cannot be transferred elsewhere; this museum in Paris, London or New York will not work."
Given LAD's complexity and punishing schedule – four-and-a-half thousand workers are now on site and will work round the clock on day and night shifts until the museum is completed – it might seem odd that Nouvel is still concerned with nuances of light and colour when there are so many other pressing tasks at hand. That would, however, be to underestimate the central role that light, reflections, refractions and visual effects play, not just in Abu Dhabi, but throughout the whole of his oeuvre.
As the architect explained in an interview with The Guardian journalist Laura Barnett in 2008, his obsession with light and the interplay between what he describes as "fragile effects" and "fleeting moments" began when Nouvel was still in his teens.
"I was 15 when I saw the Sainte-Chapelle cathedral in Paris. It made me aware for the first time of the strong emotional link between light and architecture. Ever since, I've been interested in the games architecture can play with light and shadow."
There are obvious connections between the way light is controlled in Nouvel's first major project, L'Institut du Monde Arabe, where he created a giant, mechanical mashrabiya, and the canopy at LAD; however, as the architecture critic Rowan Moore has pointed out, Nouvel has explored his obsession repeatedly in the intervening years. For Moore, it is his use of "magic surfaces" rather than identifiable forms that is the architect's real trademark.
"In the Fondation Cartier in Paris, multiple planes of glass cause the facade to dissolve into reflections and transparencies," Moore says, whereas at One New Change, next to St Paul's Cathedral in London, "he has chosen a kind of glazing with a matte and grainy surface, which is intended to be stone-like while still also glassy".
LAD is not the only museum that Nouvel has designed, nor will it be his last – he recently won the competition to design the new National Art Museum of China in Beijing. However, in the same way that an Islamic house of light effectively launched his career in 1987, it looks like another may secure his place in the architectural pantheon in 2015, when LAD is scheduled for completion. For Nouvel however, determined as he is to create buildings that respond to their environment and create a sense of place, the truth about LAD, and its canopy, is both more simple and infinitely more complex.
"The result should seem simple and obvious – at least I hope it will seem simple – but it is in fact made of a sophisticated system," he says. "For me, this project is a new, small neighbourhood of Abu Dhabi. I hope that in this microclimate people will feel good, and ... will feel like visiting it again and again. The goal is to build a part of the city."
nleech@thenational.ae
Louvre Abu Dhabi architect Jean Nouvel sees his creation come to life
In an exclusive interview on his recent visit to the capital, the architect Jean Nouvel discusses the design of Louvre Abu Dhabi with Nick Leech at a crucial stage in the project’s development.
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