Concert Hall
Luxembourg
Jean Nouvel

"When I paint smoke, it should be
so that you can hammer a nail into it."
Pablo Picasso 

Varying degrees of opacity & transparency

Jean Nouvel attempts to produce an immaterial, fully three-dimensional space in his competition proposal for the Luxembourg Concert Hall. This was  the result of partly the project's site and partly in the building purpose. The site is a part of a new development- "the European quarter" overlooking the old city of Luxembourg on one side and parkland on the other. Thus the building is a belvedere, and the essential quality of a belvedere is that you see it as little as possible in order to see more. The building's function, is to showcase music.  Nouvel articulated the contradictory roles of these two arts: " In the year 2000, if architecture is the setting into stone of living sensations and emotions, it must carry the inscription of time, based here on researching the correspondence between the immaterial nature of music and the inexorable materiality of architecture."

Nouvel proposed what he called a mono-matiere-mutable, a unified but changeable material. He suggests " Imagine a building which is four-fifths opaque and with the last fifth changing progressively from opacity to complete transparency. As you moved around it an within it, its appearance would change. From the exterior, a corner seemingly solid from one viewpoint would disappear as the viewpoint changed. The whole concept of a wall being intersected, in an interior, by another wall, would be changed by making the intersection invisible. It's the creation of a precise fog- now that's an expression I've always liked."

This precise fog is achieved by using a uniform pale gray color for opaque material and the same color screen printed onto glass in different densities from opacity to transparency.

At certain angles the exterior form of the building is clear, but placement and extent of openings or forms within the building is not. This is not merely a redefinition of immateriality in architecture. It is a resolute attempt to define a new sense of architectural space,  one based on temporal, rather than linear, measurement.