Jean Nouvel
"The elementariness that I seek has nothing to do with pure minimalism. Even when design strives to minimise the material aspect, the design is no less creative."
Bio
Jean Nouvel (1945) was born in Fumel, France. After graduation, working as an assistant to the architect Claude Parent and inspired by the urbanist and essayist Paul Virilio, he began his first works of architecture. He was a founding member of the movement “Mars 1976”, and later founded the French Architecture Union. Nouvel’s first approach to industrial design was born of a need to create objects for his architecture, for instance the table Less, manufactured by UniFor for the headquarters of the Fondation Cartier. Among his innumerable works: Institut du monde arabe in Paris; together with Fumihiko Maki and Norman Foster, three of the five towers for the Ground Zero reconstruction project in New York; the Torre Agbar in Barcelona; the Mariinski Theatre in St. Petersburg. He has received many prestigious prizes, French and international, including the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2000, the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2001, and the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2008.
