Beginning in 1970 and over the next 24 years, Jean Nouvel formed four different partnerships with other French architects, eventually taking the name Architectures Jean Nouvel in 1994. Nouvel began to acquire international recognition for his work in the 1980s, culminating in the critically acclaimed Cartier museum (Paris, 1994).

The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (1994) in Paris is representative of the perceptual illusions that are the crux of Nouvel’s architecture. The layered glass walls, partly framing and sandwiching the existing trees (including one planted by the writer Chateaubriand in 1823), create ambiguous perceptions of the building’s volume and mass. As one walks or drives along Boulevard Raspail, the glass face, with its changing reflections and refractions, appears to alternately materialize and vanish. The “Parisian jewel,” as it has been called, is often photographed under different lighting conditions, as if to call attention to the building’s primary existence as a light prism.

The glass-walled exhibition spaces are well-suited for the iconoclastic artwork for which the Cartier is known. Issey Miyake’s 1998 exhibition “Making Things” particularly captured the ambiguity that is characteristic of the architecture. Similar to Nouvel’s work, the Japanese designer's clothes are simultaneously insubstantial and solid, the perceived mass of the object differing from its physical reality by virtue of its texture or shape and its interaction with the human body. A later example of Nouvel’s use of light and glass to generate illusory spaces is the Friedrichstrasse department store (1996) in Berlin. While the parti for the Cartier Foundation building was planar and in its facade, here it is centrifugal and in its core. Interior cones of curved, partly reflective silvered glass provide a kaleidoscopic view of the spaces surrounding the center void. The lobby of the Lyons Opera House (1993) is yet another example of his mastery of the architecture of illusion. Nouvel created a ghostly, ethereal space by surrounding one’s descent and ascent on escalators with dimly lit black curved shiny surfaces.

Contemporary art has had a marked influence on Nouvel’s architecture. The Chocolate Factory (1990) in Blois, clad in black and sitting on a grass lawn, is reminiscent of the work of minimalist and environmental sculptor Richard Serra. Also, Dan Graham’s work, specifically the use of alternately reflective and transparent surfaces and the incorporation of landscape elements to create fragmented views through layers of glass (much as the Chateaubriand cedar functions at the Cartier Center), has had a decisive and acknowledged influence on the architect.

The commission that catapulted him onto the international scene was the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab World Institute) that he won in 1981 with several other French architects in the first competition of President Francois Mitterand’s ambitious new architecture agenda. The building was a critical success, and at the time of its completion in 1987, it was hailed as the best high-tech building since the Pompidou Center. In the context of his later work, however, it is more significant as an early example of spatial illusions, reflection, and refraction, in which, as the architect himself has observed, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether a wall is 5 or 50 feet away. The south facade is a skin of light-sensitive metal diaphragms. These open and close like camera apertures, embedding modern technology in a mosaic of Arabic patterns. By alluding to past and present, the facade acquires the illusion of permanence typically associated with monuments, yet it is light as air: a reflected sunset or sunrise vaporizes the wall, transforming the metal layer behind the glass into a shimmering lacy curtain.

Nouvel’s architecture reconfigures the curtain wall, whether glass and aluminum or stainless steel, into an image-making device, and hence his facades are akin to screens. He alludes to modern technology in an effort to make architecture that reflects contemporary society. He sometimes uses forms and materials that make portions of his buildings and sites resemble boats, trains, or even airport runways, as in the Onyx Center (1988). Superimposed and offset grids or views through perforated metal to a brighter space allude to the pixilated and striated nature of computer and television screens. Sometimes he screen-prints onto the glazing, as in the holographic scenes on Euralille’s shopping center (1995) in Lille, France, or the text that wraps the Cartier Factory (1993).

Although his work may differ greatly from such postmodernists as the Spanish-born Ricardo Boffil, whose historicist approach Nouvel has openly criticized, it exhibits some affinities with the United States firm Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, namely, in the use of signage and graphics as architectural components and in the reconfiguration of vernacular elements into a new language, such as the wood shutters of the Hotel des Thermes (1992) in Dax, or the hotel in Bouliac, both in Southwest France, where he was born. In addition, elements of architectural representation often inform his buildings, as in the Belfort Theater (1984), in which a severed wall is patterned with the striping of a section drawing, or in the high-rise project for La Défense (1989), in which he emphasizes the perspectival diminished visibility of a 100-meter tower as viewed from the ground by gradating materials and colors from black to grays to white so that the “Endless Tower” disappears into the often overcast Parisian sky.

Nouvel has transformed the picture window of modern architecture into an image screen. He uses the same glass curtain walls with which Gropius built literal transparency but toward phenomenal ends, in the service of space that constantly reconfigures itself as the light changes. Although Nouvel’s work demonstrates dexterity with new building technology, it is the construction of spatial illusions that makes his architecture. In this regard, he rightly claims Mies van der Rohe as his artistic father, another master of glass and light whose precisely detailed physical structures were only the means to more ethereal architectural ends.

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.