The eminent French architect is building an extension to MoMA which will be as tall as the Empire State building. He talks about philosophy, eroticism and the moral dilemmas of building in Abu Dhabi.
Nouvel’s initial inspiration for 53W53 were early 20th-century American architect Hugh Ferriss’ charcoal renderings of classic New York skyscrapers, such as the Majestic Hotel and the Woolworth Building – but final renders of 53W53 show far less platonic geometry. The building’s structure comprises interconnected segments that taper according to varying height and setback limits within its site. Each segment has an individual flat-edged, shard-like form, so no side of the envelope is homogeneous. The structural frame, a visible concrete skeleton Nouvel calls the “diagrid”, culminates in a peak as sharp as a Stanley blade – an arrow to some inconceivable height that even 53W53 itself, originally slated for 1,250 feet, proves we have not yet reached.
[Architecture] is the art of using the force of your opponent against himself,” Nouvel says of the site’s complex restrictions, which caused years of delay and a reported $85.3m purchase of 240,000 square feet of air rights. “It’s like judo. Every time you have a constraint, you need to use it. You need to push it to its limits; you need to give it a sense other than the constraint, so that it will look as if you did it on purpose.”
Despite what Baudrillard might have called its “crazy verticality”, Nouvel’s aspirations for 53W53, scheduled for completion in fall 2018, sound almost modest:“It’s going to try to hold its place,” he says. “It’s going to try to be good enough for New York … it’s going to try to make its own small contribution, and it’s done in a way that ensures this contribution is readable, understandable, and it’s maybe a bit more precious than others. And it’s a little linked to this notion – a fairly disputed notion these days – that architecture is still an art, sometimes.”
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Nouvel has frequently denounced “the way cities are built today – through technocratic and simplistic laws”, but acknowledges that “sensitive laws” are “difficult”; “an oxymoron”.
“Architects are today very relative, because they’re no longer taking part in the fundamental urban decision-making … I think that from the moment you’re not in the decision-making that takes into account the landscape, the colours, the relationship with the other buildings, the context, you can’t really go anywhere interesting; because then each person is just doing their own little thing.”