On Jean Nouvel's website, the Philharmonie de Paris is still marked as under construction. It is always difficult to complete a project of this scale, but the Philharmonic is not just an ambitious plan of an architect, but also a battle worthy of an epic. In this battle, the dream of architectural greatness, state political ambitions and the financial pragmatism of the participating companies came together. The Paris Philharmonic was planned as a historical, as well as personally important for Nouvel project, on which the author had high hopes. But the architect, as he himself puts it, became a victim of the ever-rushing technocrats who disfigured his plan.
Jean Nouvel boycotted the opening ceremony of the Philharmonic on January 14, 2015, on the grounds that it was premature. In particular, the façade was severely unfinished due to difficulties with the Belgian firm Belgometal VN, in charge of the implementation, and removed from the site following legal proceedings. At the same time, the architect was accused from all sides. The initial “underestimation” of the project and the resulting skyrocketing budget led the construction company, Bouygues, to take a number of decisions in September 2013 without consulting the project author. As a result, many defects appeared in the building and in the area around it.
The Paris Philharmonic was conceived as the main cultural site under Nicolas Sarkozy and one of the components of the Greater Paris plan. The cost of the project based on the results of an architectural competition in 2006 was determined at around 136 million euros, and in 2012 it was already about 386 million. According to estimates made by the Regional Audit Office (CRC) in 2015, the final amount was 534.7 million euros - four times more than the original amount. In its report, the Accounts Chamber explained that a number of budget re-evaluations and delays in construction were caused by poor management of the construction, which is the fault of many participants. CRC officials also criticized the “inadequate” way of funding the Paris mayor's office for this type of project. To this end, the city took out a loan from the Société Générale bank in the amount of 158 million euros at a relatively low interest rate. At the same time, to cover the increasing costs, the mayor's office created an association, which was calculated with state subsidies. The final amount was 234.5 million. Following the publication of the report, opposition Republicans accused the city government of “initially cheating on the cost of the project” and creating an associative structure to hide the real amount of debt.
The attraction of additional public funds caused a negative reaction and censure from all sides. Neither the state (which paid for 45% of the project), nor the city of Paris (45%) or the Ile-de-France region (10%) want to return to this issue today. And in the corridors of power, accusations of what was happening fell on the architect. Jean Nouvel is known as the world record holder for excess funding, a man who "despises public money." In the spring of 2013, Nouvel made an attempt to contact the president to signal an alarm about the situation with the Philharmonic, but the doors of the Elysee Palace in front of him did not open, and the meeting with François Hollande did not take place. Meanwhile, the condemnation of Nouvel continued as a poet or a perfectionist esthete, who endlessly needed to change something, while the causes of the problems lay in a completely different area.
Thus, the customers, represented by the government and the mayor's office, entrusted the management of the project to a private company, bypassing the law on the control of public works (MOP). During the construction, Bouygues carried out the work without the blueprints approved by the architects. This is a violation of the law, to which the customers deliberately turned a blind eye, limiting the verification process to a maximum period of 14 days, and the architects who worked on the construction site did not keep up with approving the growing number of documents, and after 14 days, construction companies had the right to make their own decisions. For Nouvel's team, the site visit was a source of constant "surprises": during construction, elements that were not part of the project suddenly appeared. For example, at a construction site, concrete blocks with 800 holes were found that were cast too quickly. The metal beams supporting the ceiling of the Great Hall were not suitable for placing suspended acoustic panels - "clouds" on them. All these malfunctions were the fault of the leadership of the Philharmonic, which deliberately removed the architects from construction control in order to complete the project as soon as possible.
“I want to expose the horrific lynching I fell victim to,” Jean Nouvel tells Figaro magazine. "I remained the captain of the ship, despite the lack of opportunity to be at the helm." It is important to note that the most criticized components of the Philharmonic's project are public access to the roof of the building (not fully completed and only opened in September 2016), the facade swirling like a funnel, the light billboard on the facade (the screen is now placed on the other side and is hardly noticeable) and wood furnishings of the Great Hall - accounted for only about 6 percent of the total budget.
“We initially started with the wrong construction cost,” explains Jean Nouvel. "This is a French disease, which is the underestimation of major government projects." It is significant that the competition project of the Philharmonic by Zaha Hadid, which indicated a more realistic, as time has shown, a budget of 300 million euros, was not even accepted for consideration by the jury - precisely because of the allegedly excessive cost.
One of the key losses of this project was for Jean Nouvel the departure from the office of his main partner and responsible for financial affairs - Michel Pelissier. It was he who saved Nouvel from bankruptcy in the 1990s and ensured his prosperity for the next 20 years. He chose to leave in December 2012, rather than participate in the construction, due to a difficult relationship with the project manager of the Paris Philharmonic - Patrice Januel. Despite the fact that Nouvel and Januel have already built one joint project,
The Quai Branly Museum, in this case, relations deteriorated to such an extent that the Philharmonic's management tried to break the contract with the architect. The conflict began with the signing of an agreement, where the amount of the architect's fee was determined under pressure from Januel. “They imposed a fee on me, explaining that if I refused, Renzo Piano would take my place,” Nouvel recalls. Zhanuel responded with a tough refusal to any proposals from the architect to revise the construction time and the size of the budget. To negotiate with the manager of the Philharmonic, the architect sent his partner and friend, Michel Pelissier, who did not perform a miracle, achieving only a small increase in the budget. Nouvelle reproaches Pelissier in collusion with the Philharmonic directors. “We were paid 12.5% of 118 million, this is a low percentage for such a construction, it should be 16% or 17%,” says the architect. At the same time, the customers, the Ministry of Culture and the Paris City Hall, wanted to maintain relations and patch the holes in the sinking ship. Construction progressed slowly, as it was necessary to find a compromise between the slashed state budget, the struggle for quality waged by the architects, the interests of a heavy consortium of construction companies and the vagaries of the weather.
In the word "philharmonic" there are two components of the concept: "love" - phileo and "harmony" - harmonia. Nouvel uses this metaphor in the accompanying text to the project, describing it as a play of "successive harmonies" with the city, with the Parc de la Villette, with the Cité de la Musique of Christian de Portzamparca and the ring road. Harmony with the lighting of Paris, where "a ray of light in gray clouds, rain … Architecture as a composition of metered reflections, glare, created by a smooth relief, materializing in the surface of pavements clad in aluminum with a pattern in the style of Escher graphics" - this is how Nouvel describes his project. The building is covered from the outside with 340 thousand aluminum "birds", the cladding of which is still not completely finished.
Nouvelle conceived the Philharmonic not as a separate building, but as a hill-building in La Villette, which is a continuation of the park. This is a kind of artificial mountain, a belvedere, which you can climb, like an observation deck, in order to observe the circular panorama of the city at a height of 37 meters. This creates a unique perspective on the northeastern part of Paris, where the dome of the Les Invalides, the Eiffel Tower, the Montmartre hill and the Sacre-Coeur church enter into a visual dialogue with the modern buildings of the suburb. The idea of an artificial hill has something in common with another famous metropolitan park - Buttes-Chaumont, and also continues the idea of Bernard Chumi, author of La Villette, about horizontal shelters.
The Philharmonic is located in the east of Paris, on the very border between the city and the suburbs, and, according to Nouvel's plan, should unite within itself different segments of the population. The digital screen, integrated into the facade of the Philharmonic building, was supposed to announce concerts from the side of the circular road - Boulevard Peripheric, attracting the audience of the Parisian suburbs. Now it is located at ground level at the main entrance and is hardly noticeable.
The Great Philharmonic Hall, designed for 2,400 listeners, deserves special attention. It was planned to be a grand space, representing the latest in acoustics and capable of hosting some of the world's largest symphony orchestras. At the same time, it reflected the aspiration of the city of Paris and the French state to gain world status among concert halls for academic music. “There is only 32 meters between the conductor and the farthest listener! It is hard to imagine anything better than this in the whole world,”exclaims Laurent Bale, the current director of the Philharmonic, with enthusiasm.
To implement this project, Nouvel enlisted the support of leading international acousticians, New Zealand sound researcher Harold Marshall and Japanese engineer Yasuhisa Toyota.
The architect, whose name is forgotten to be mentioned when talking about the construction of the Philharmonic, is Brigitte Metra, the author of the Great Hall project. This work turned for her to the fact that she was on the verge of bankruptcy, and her architectural plans were used without her consent by the construction company. Meter even before the proceedings, Nouvel filed a lawsuit against a wood processing company that stole her developments, and the full fee was never paid to her.
It is important to emphasize that the main initiator of the creation of the Paris Philharmonic was the French composer Pierre Boulez, who died in January 2016. He recalled the struggle he waged for over 30 years to create a full-fledged concert hall for a symphony orchestra in the French capital, and its reasons: “In Paris, we played music mainly in theaters - Chatelet or Champs Elysees. The Pleyel Concert Hall, built in the 1920s, was a complete acoustic failure."
In the 1980s, Boulez dreamed of reproducing the New York Lincoln Center in Paris, where theater, opera and philharmonic society would be combined. This project was the "Music City", built for the park of La Villette by Christian de Portzamparc, only on a much smaller scale than the composer had planned. It includes only a hall for 800 people, a conservatory and a restaurant. Portzampark hoped that he would finally be able to complete his project by winning the Philharmonic competition, but past failures are not suitable for the beautiful story of the creation of a "masterpiece". The architect was chosen as a member of the jury, which excluded his participation in the competition, however, he insisted on this opportunity - and lost.
A large concert hall was planned in the Bastille Opera project: it was the political idea of François Mitterrand to create an opera for the people. According to Boulez, this was another musical failure, as the theater was built too quickly. The French President was in a hurry so that the opening of Opera Bastille coincided with the celebration of the bicentennial of the Great French Revolution on July 13, 1989. Boulez said with disappointment: “When we have to bend under the time constraints of politicians, we lose the main meaning of the project. The acoustics turned out to be unsuccessful. We don't hear singers in the Opera Bastille hall. And for many more years, Pierre Boulez tried to convey the obvious to the authorities and society: if Paris wants to participate in international musical life, modern orchestras need a large Philharmonic.
This background to the creation of Nouvel's building explains a lot, as a kind of prologue to the unfortunate fate of a large project. However, what happened is not new at all: it is enough to recall similar projects of other major architects: "eternal", still not completed construction
The Elbe Philharmonic in Hamburg Herzog and de Meuron or the Frank Gehry Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles with its incredibly sprawling budget.
The opening of the Paris Philharmonic in January 2015 coincided with a difficult moment for France - a terrorist attack by the editorial office of Charlie Hebdo. Therefore, Jean Nouvel did not then actively speak out with accusatory statements in the press, talking about the difficult conditions in which he had to work, and only later returned to this issue. By filing a claim with the Supreme Regional Court of Paris, the architect demanded not monetary compensation, but the reconstruction of the building, bringing it in line with the original plans. Otherwise, Nouvel refused authorship, forbidding to mention himself as the architect of the Paris Philharmonic. The lawsuit concerned 26 design discrepancies, which, in the author's opinion, are important structural components of the building. This is the facing material of the inner shell of the concert hall, parapets, individual parts of the facade and the walking area around the building, changed without the architect's permission. The architect also accused the Philharmonic of the fact that without his consent the general geometry of the foyer was changed, and the walls, as we see today, were left without facing in the form of quite ascetic concrete. Despite this, on April 16, 2015, the court decision in the Paris Philharmonic case was negative for Nouvel.
To the accusations against him and the refusal to take his arguments seriously, the architect replies: “The situation is extremely simple. The construction of the Philharmonic went ahead without my participation. The instructions given to the construction companies have not been agreed with me. I was deliberately excluded [from the process]. All this was done with the goal of completing the project as quickly as possible, at the expense of quality, but for the sake of an unrealistic construction schedule. We have lost money. The Philharmonic project was rated too low from the very beginning. We are paying for this today. Politicians must know this and understand the consequences [of their actions].”What happened to the Philharmonic is still badly damaging to the architect's image. The project for the reconstruction of the Museum of Art and History in Geneva, on which he had been working since 1998, was put on display last winter - before the start of implementation - for the vote of the townspeople (in the case of budget projects, this should be done by law in Switzerland). The residents of Geneva voted against the project, including because of a cartoon poster in which the artist depicted the architect as a vampire Nosferatu, pulling claws for money. The poster frightened the townspeople, recalling the story of the Philharmonic.
Whether Jean Nouvel is the culprit for politicians hiding the actual cost of construction for tactical reasons is difficult to say unequivocally. An often disguised political reality determines the work of architects who are forced to accept these rules of the game in order to survive in the profession. The participants in this project, including the leaders of the state with their ambitions and the French tradition of perpetuating their name in a large building, probably guessed about the difficulties of implementation and insufficient budget. The architect also understood all this even before he got involved in this game, and enlisted the support of the mayor of Paris and the minister of culture. But Nouvel does not consider himself guilty at all: even if he participated in the initial "underestimation" of the project, all this took place within a system built on deception. When in May 2013, journalists asked the inspector for finance, Pierre Anteno, the question “How could the state underestimate the project to such an extent?”, He replied: “This is a cheating game of poker. The low price is set initially, everyone knows that in any case overruns are expected. This is done so as not to wave a red rag in front of the Ministry of Economy,
Bercy (which votes on the adoption of the project - approx. ND). And in the future, the state is forcing architects and contractors to cut budgets."
"I will fight to the end for the dignity of the Philharmonic … architecture is an everyday struggle," Nouvel says, continuing to defend unsuccessfully in court not only his reputation, which has already suffered a lot, but also the social status of the profession. “For more than thirty years, architects have lost the ability to influence the situation in the country. We are not responsible either for the construction site or for the projects themselves. Nowadays we do not decide anything else, - the architect says disappointedly, - construction companies do it for us”. At the same time, the representative of the main construction company of the Philharmonic - Bouyges - Jean-Francois Scheidt is proud to say that it was Nouvel who pushed their engineers to develop unique professional skills, to the wider use of digital technologies, giving them the opportunity to improve their qualifications within the framework of a complex author's project.
Today the construction of the Philharmonic is officially completed. Over the past year, there have been overwhelmingly rave reviews in the press, and the excitement surrounding the conflict has subsided. Despite the fact that the building still requires additional funds for its final completion, the court does not accept the arguments of the architect: allegedly, his claim has insufficient grounds. But, as Jean Nouvel recently said, "it's a matter of time." Otherwise, he believes, the construction can be considered a failure.
