Dome to delight Louvre Abu Dhabi visitors
Tadao Ando tastes concrete success in Tokyo retrospective
PARIS, Sept 27, (Agencies): Sunshine and starlight will dance over visitors to the Louvre Abu Dhabi Museum when it opens in November, filtering through a huge dome that appears to hover over land and sea.
The aery dome, held aloft with four massive but invisible structures, has an earthly weight of 7,500 tons — 200 tons more than the iron structure of the Eiffel Tower. It is a defining feature of the new museum on Saadiyat Island, a salty flood plain of the Arabian Gulf, which sits half in the water, half on land.
Jean Nouvel, the renowned French architect behind the project, said he wanted to build the museum “in relation to the country it’s in,” using innovative techniques to capture the sands, the sea, the horizons of the “enormous sky” and the culture of Abu Dhabi, which serves as capital of the United Arab Emirates.
“I’m a contextual architect ... buildings should know where they are,” Nouvel said as he showed off the final mock-up in the Paris atelier where the project was born.
Nouvel was visibly proud of the engineering and artistic feats behind the museum which, with its 55 buildings scattered around the dome, was built to resemble an Arab village.
With the Louvre name on the Abu Dhabi museum, the outcome had to be grand — even though the Louvre Museum makes clear this is neither a branch nor an annex. Instead, it is a joint venture between the governments of the United Arab Emirates and France, with the UAE paying the Louvre for use of its name for 30 years.
Art works from the Louvre and other French museums will make up half the collection of 600 works distributed over some 6,400 square meters in galleries around the site.
But it is what Nouvel calls the “rain of light” from the dome that is the focal point of his creation. The splashes of light are designed to skip about the museum interior, changing shape and place as the sun rises and sets.
Inspired by the sunlight glinting through palm trees and shadows cast by fronds, Nouvel’s architectural and engineering team devised a system of interlocking geometrical shapes — on eight layers of cladding within the dome — to produce openings for sunlight to peek inside and fall in ever-changing patterns throughout the museum.
“It is the apparition of these spots (of light) that gives a consciousness of time, of the passage of time, of eternity,” Nouvel said at a recent meeting with the Anglo-American Press Association in Paris.
The dome, which measures 180 meters (590 feet) in diameter, also creates a micro-climate that helps protect visitors and art works from the blazing sun, along with the stone floor and vistas of water.
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TOKYO: Japanese master Tadao Ando took an unconventional route to architecture, starting out as a boxer and a lorry driver.
Completely self-taught, his unorthodox training did not stop him winning the Pritzker prize, considered the Nobel of architecture, following in the footsteps of the likes of Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid.
“Without studying, without going to vocational school, I became an architect, by observing, by experimenting, by feeling, by being touched,” he told AFP as a retrospective of his work opened in Tokyo.
Some put his success down to a simple approach to architecture. Concrete, light and wind are his three base elements, he said.
Architecture is “a living and moving being”, said the 76-year-old, who has buildings all over the world, from Mexico to Manhattan and Manchester.
“It’s knowing where to place a child so he feels most at home. It’s not beauty, it’s thinking together, living together,” said Ando, who still