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Luxembourg's Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean has almost everything a modern art museum could want: a prime location overlooking the nation's capital, a dramatic new building designed by renowned architect I.M. Pei and an expected deluge of art-hungry visitors. Luxembourg is one of this year's European Capitals of Culture, and a new TGV fast-train line from France opens in June...
...seemed oddly empty. Unlike its more established peers - Paris' Pompidou Center, Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum, New York City's Museum of Modern Art - the Grand-Duc Jean (named after the sovereign who retired in 2000) doesn't have much of a permanent collection. Planners behind Mudam, as the Musée d'Art Moderne is known for short, started buying works about a decade ago. Even then, Monets and Manets were beyond their budget, and a Picasso was out of the question. So Mudam ended up focusing on what is sometimes called contemporary art, stuff produced after the 1970s...
...higher plane. "There's something archaic about turning knobs to make water run," he says. "The[an error occurred while processing this directive] controls should be something you caress rather than manipulate." Thus Nouvel, who designed such innovative buildings as the Torre Agbar in Barcelona and the newly opened Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, had found another design challenge. Upscale home-furnishing stores are now rolling out his bathroom fixtures, which he designed to eliminate drips, washers and howls of discomfort from the modern home's most intimate space. Nouvel says his faucet design was inspired...
...home in Paris for the inauguration of another major work dedicated to what he calls "selective dematerialization." He has taken a prime parcel at the heart of the city, along the Seine at the foot of the Eiffel Tower, and artfully hidden a world-class museum in it. His Musée du Quai Branly is perhaps the most radical expression yet of Nouvel's self-proclaimed pride in being "an architect of context." Its northern face, shielded from the road along the Seine by an immense transparent glass screen, exactly echoes the river's bend; on the west...
...panel reflects the sky. Up, earth; down, sky. His Cartier Foundation in Paris is a glass-walled structure with a freestanding glass wall situated a few meters in front of it. The effect is to create multiple veils of transparency in which the building seems to dematerialize. With the Musée du Quai Branly, Nouvel again shows that his buildings are in deliberately complex interplay not just with their surroundings, but with their function. Not simple, but sublime; you might call them buildings for adults...