Inaugurated on last November 8 by President Emmanuel Macron, traveling to the United Arab Emirates, the Louvre Abu Dhabi has not yet finished talking about itself. His first marketing move, a few weeks after the inauguration: announces that he will exhibit "the most expensive painting in the world", the Salvador Mundi of Leonardo da Vinci, auctioned for 450 million dollars in November.



The Louvre Abu Dhabi - a project launched ten years ago under Jacques Chirac and signed by architect Jean Nouvel (who also designed the Arab World Institute) - is expected to bring almost a billion euros to France.



I always say that architecture is the petrification of a moment of culture. A project is not an intuition. A building is a witness of an era. It belongs to a history, a geography, a city, a local culture which it prolongs, contradicts and with which it dialogues. It's an adventure every time. This petrification is always a mystery.
You say that we tend to forget that architecture remains an art... Architecture is the art of building. I always thought that in the 21st century, architecture would take precedence over construction. For a century, there has been debate about what is architecture and what is construction. One could think that the field of architecture was going to expand. But in fact, the opposite has happened. Today, 95% of buildings that are built are not approached from the angle of art. Moreover, all urban developments remove this possibility. Because an architect, today, finds himself in front of a building belonging to a zoning, which belongs to a template, which contains a number of square meters ... and then it's over. We are very far from the extension of architecture as art.

What were the beginnings of your work on the "Louvre des sables"?
I was named as an architect for the future art district of Saadiyat. On the initiative of the United Arab Emirates, the director of the Guggenheim was mandated to establish the development strategy for this cultural district. His idea ? Propose five large buildings, with the largest concentration of art objects in the world. In addition to the Museum of Civilizations that I have taken care of, there will be Norman Forster's Sheikh Zayed National Museum, Frank Gehry's Guggenheim-Abu Dhabi, still under construction, a performance hall designed by the sadly deceased Zaha Hadid, and a marine museum designed by Tadao Ando.

Has not architecture become an art reserved for the rich?
When one is invited to participate in such a program, it is impossible to refuse. It is a question of concretizing the golden age of Abu Dhabi, which has experienced an exceptional economic rise in recent years. Big cities and buildings are always like that. It is the economic power of cities like Venice, Paris, London, New York that, at their apotheosis, has generated the largest architectural projects.

This is not the first museum you build, but it's the first time you've drawn a "museum city".
A museum must be open. I defend the Greek conception of the Agora: it is a place of meeting, exchange and dialogue. The museum is a part of the city and not a building dedicated to conservation. As a contextual architect, I wanted this building to belong to the culture of the place. I wanted to exploit the characteristics of the island: the presence of the sea, the sky and the sand which are the three constituent elements of Saadiyat. These are also highly symbolic elements, because when working on a "universal" museum, these elements become vital.

A huge dome of lace protects this building. Why this choice ?

More than a building, this medina is composed by the different white volumes of the galleries of the museum. Above all, I wanted to wrap this "cultural city" with a microclimate. I sheltered it under a large parasol. A dome with a diameter, at its base, of 180 meters, formed by several thicknesses of metal mantillas. This white dome treats the spiritual dimension of the place. It is a dome of thought that protects ideas that intersect and meet. This dome, perforated by the light, also has a cosmographic dimension: like all domes, it is the symbol of the sky.

You are a contextual architect. How did the Arab world and its culture inspire you?
When I built the Institute of the Arab World, I obviously thought about this culture. But it's not an "Arab building", just a tribute. But there is no confusion between the issues that arise today and the depth of Arab culture. All civilizations have their greatness. And the Arab civilization is in the middle of it all. It needed a place that opens windows to all civilizations throughout the ages. The vast majority of the works will tell the ancient history of civilizations, cultures and religions, illustrated in particular by the exhibition of a sheet of the Blue Koran, a Gothic Bible and a Pentateuch. This is to send a tolerance message. You have to go to these countries to understand them. It takes another political consciousness.

I defend the opposite position. My projects are all very different. I feel obliged to be in the singularity. Because at the urban scale, we find ourselves facing an immensity of buildings disconnected from all meaning ... because disconnected from their site, the context and the history of the city, or the country. This situation, is it not, at bottom, the photograph of a Western society itself a little frozen?



I think it's more due to the extrapolation of the international style. Today, with computers, office buildings, homes or shopping centers are pretty much all based on the same typologies. We change some parameters, the building arrives at the right dimension and it's over. But that's not architecture.