The Institut du Monde Arabe

Judged on purpose, structure and site, and the subtractive test bites unevenly. The north block’s river face is compelled by the site: it takes the bend of the quai and the line of the Seine. The cleft is compelled by its aim, the view of Notre-Dame driven through the mass. The south screen is compelled by the brief as the building reads it: an institute of the Arab world shading a south face takes up the screen that filters sun in the courtyard house and the mosque. But much behind the faces is generic, rooms housed rather than shaped, and the mechanism the building is famous for proved removable in practice: when it stopped, the building went on working. A part that can idle for decades without loss of use is not wholly required. It clears the floor of 7.5 by a tenth.

Score: 7.6 / 10

What the building brings into the open is a stance of mediation, stated in space. One face turns to Paris and its river; the other turns south through a screen whose geometry is Islamic in descent and photographic in mechanism. The disclosure is that the meeting of the two cultures is to be made in light and in geometry, the shared mathematics of pattern, rather than in iconography. Behind the south wall filtered light falls in figures on floors and walls, and the condition of the veiled interior, seeing out without being seen, is given to a public institution of a secular republic. That is a meaning, not merely a mood. What holds the axis: this is the West’s machine reading of a vernacular device, and what it discloses of Arab life itself is thin, the sign of the screen rather than the dwelling the screen served. The charge of an Orientalist figure is answerable, and it is not dismissed.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The building rises at a few moments, and they are real. Behind the south wall on a bright day the patterned light across the floors is a beauty of a high order of its kind: cold, exact, changing with the hour. The cleft, a slot of sky and a glimpse of Notre-Dame between two sheer faces, is a fine spatial event. The roof terrace gives one of the great views of central Paris, though that elevation is the city’s, borrowed. The book tower turning in its glass has a quiet grace. Between these moments the building is cool and correct rather than elevated, and no single room rises as a hall or a nave does. Height at the facade, frequency limited, and the figure stays below 8.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Archetypes are present and mostly evoked. The screen is the threshold of the veiled interior, the courtyard and the inner house; the diaphragm is the eye, the iris that widens and narrows, so that the building figures itself as a seeing organ turned to the south. One pattern is built into the plan rather than applied: two blocks split by a cleft aimed at a cathedral, two worlds facing and divided, the river on one side and the south on the other. That is the strongest archetypal fact of the building. Even so, the deep patterns are carried by the skin and by one gesture of the plan; the building’s body does not organise itself as temple, cave or axis. Myth evoked, with one structural instance.

Score: 7.6 / 10

In 1981 the high-tech architecture of Paris was the exposed machinery of the Centre Pompidou; the alternatives were the Beaux-Arts manner and postmodern pastiche. Nouvel swerved twice. He took the machine off the frame and put it in the skin, so that the facade became an instrument rather than a display of structure. And he made the high-tech skin speak of a culture, translating a vernacular Islamic device into precision metal and photomechanics, a move neither high tech nor postmodern quotation made. The stake was real: a young office, a national and diplomatic commission on a major Seine site, and a mechanism no one had built at this scale. The cost was paid: the mechanism failed, and that failure is part of what the wager staked. Held below the gate because the turn reorganised a skin, not a whole building.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Would a different form change what the work knows? Put a plain curtain wall on the south block and the building ceases to say anything about its subject: the screen is the instrument of its knowledge, and the light inside is the institute’s thesis lived. Put a straight block on the quai and the dialogue between the river city and the southern screen is lost. To that degree the form knows. But the use inside is not changed in kind by the form: a library is a library on these floors, and the museum has been rehung within an envelope indifferent to it. And with the diaphragms idle, the form’s living part, its answer to the sun, has for long been a still picture of an answer. The knowing is concentrated in the skin.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Evidence over promise, over nearly four decades. The building has been studied in teaching on facades and environmental skins, in the debate over critical regionalism and over the Orientalist figure, in accounts of Nouvel’s career and of the great Parisian projects of its decade. Each return finds something: the double face, the eye of the diaphragm, the politics of a building made by a republic for a league of states, the parable of a responsive skin that would not respond. What holds the axis at 7.5, where it meets the Universal Minimum exactly, is that the yield narrows. The building’s ideas are few and are stated clearly at first sight; it does not open into new depths on each visit as a great room does. Its depth is discursive more than spatial.

Score: 7.5 / 10

The field is the facade and the building of cultural institutions, and the Institut has stood in view since 1987, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force: it reorganised what a facade could be, a patterned, responsive and culturally coded skin, in an architecture that had treated the skin as neutral glass or as structure displayed, and it opened a way for Western high tech to address the Islamic world without pastiche. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: large and traceable. The patterned screen became one of the defining motifs of building across the Gulf and beyond, fixed and moving, on towers and institutions and in a generation of parametric screens; Nouvel’s own later work in the region carries it, a perforated dome among it; and the building made his name, a career crowned by the Pritzker Prize in 2008. The reach is partly of a motif rather than of a way of building, and much that followed made the screen decoration.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Weighed on form, then use, then fabric, over thirty-nine years. The form is wholly legible, its image famous and copied. The use has been continuous since 1987, as institute, museum, library and auditorium, in its own purpose. The fabric is whole, but the mechanism of the diaphragms, the defining part of the defining face, failed in the hands of its first builders and stood largely idle for much of the building’s life, with renovation needed and its present working not settled. That is a failure of the original making, and it takes something from the work in proportion to what the mechanism was: the instrument on which the building’s wager rested. The figure stands a tenth below what a building of this age charged in its use or fabric usually holds. Presence earns little; fame is not proof of permanence.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. Command is high in the making of the parts: the precision of the metal panels, the drawing of the facade grid, the detail of steel and glass, the clarity of the cleft and the curve, the craft of the book tower. Where it is static, the building is beautifully assembled. The structure is competent and unremarkable; the work is in the envelope. The making as it stands includes a mechanism of motors and linkages that proved unreliable in service. Its failure is weighed on The Imperishable and not charged twice, but a responsive system that does not respond is not command of the means in full.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the north block’s sheer glass curve on the river and the south block’s dense patterned wall, city face and southern screen. They obey one law. The square module and the metal grid govern both, and the building’s single thesis, two faces of one institute meeting at a measured cut, organises the opposition rather than suffering it. Even the book tower turns within the same orthogonal glass. What bends the law: the interiors, rearranged over the years, are less bound by it than the envelope. And the range it covers is modest, two faces and a cleft held in one precise language; narrowness is not coherence. Coherence high, range narrow.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Orders held: the city, in the river, the curve of the quai and the cut aimed at Notre-Dame; the diplomatic order of a republic and a league of states; the order of learning, in library, museum and auditorium; the natural order of sun and season the screen was made to answer; and, through geometry, the sacred art of Islam without its worship. They are held in one structure, chiefly through the skin and the cut. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is thin or absent: the sacred is present only as pattern; labour, the family and dwelling are absent; and the natural cycle is held in principle more than in fact while the mechanism is idle. An institute’s envelope holds the meeting of worlds as a figure, and the figure describes the form.

Score: 7.0 / 10