Architect Trashes His Own New Building
Running two years late and three times over its original budget, Paris’s new $550-million concert hall was still surrounded by an army of workmen fanatically fixing cladding panels to the facade when the conductor took to his dais on Wednesday evening. But the building’s architect, Jean Nouvel, was conspicuously absent. “The architecture is martyred, the details sabotaged,†he wrote in a blistering editorial in Le Monde that day, describing the finished result as a kind of architecture “that oscillates between counterfeiting and tampering.”
