Leaves, by Nouvel

Jean Nouvel - Louvre Museum, Abi Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Approaching the Louvre Museum in Abi Dhabi from the city, the white, low cupola seems a flattened echo of the round cupolas found in Arab architecture.

Approaching from the water, the shaded space shows its scattered light, which continues the sparkling light of the water onto the architecture.

On a more abstract level, the museum is a ‘city’ with houses, streets and plaza’s that is ‘protected’ from the sun by a Buckminster Fuller kind of dome. If we fold it a bit further: if ‘protection’ becomes ‘conservation’, we could also read in it all a small Pompeii. The cupola becomes the ash that conserves a civilization.

This latter reading is a beautiful one, as it is abstract metaphor of the essence of a museum like the Louvre: exhibiting what is conserved. In a way a museum represents the selection of those things we value enough to preserve is.

The Pompeii iconography also means that one walks in an excavation-site, an exciting place where new things can be found around every corner, behind every door, triggering curiosity. When everything becomes a theme park, this museum is probably the subtlest one of all.

Ironically the building also represents a ruin, in its original state.

Jean Nouvel - Louvre Museum, Abi Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Caught in a wave of enthusiasm about this stunning design, I forget to tell you that its designer is French – Jean Nouvel. The fragmented layout of the building is a feature that more of his works have, and his fascination with glimmering surfaces is apparent, but all together it is one of the most amazing architectures I have seen in a while.

We have seen Zaha Hadid aerodynamic stuff; it is time for something else. And Jean Nouvel career seems to have made a promising turn after the controversial ‘penis’ in Barcelona and the ‘Disney’ Musée du Quai Branly museum in Paris. The Louvre Museum in Abi Dhabi is however very, very promising.

If we proceed into the building the iconography shifts. The most dominant iconography is that of leaves filtering the sun.

Leaves filtering light, shadows (Photographer: Washed Up/Flickr)

Secondary iconographies include: a disco-ball, a cracked egg, and the Pantheon in Rome.

The beautiful cupola made me think of defensive architecture. Could such a big construction also be at help against (urban warfare), such as mortar fire and/or small rockets – could a UN-post in Darfur (Congo) be secured by a couple of such protective domes? If so, the construction could maybe even lowered onto the ground in case of emergency, and lifted upwards when violence decreases, representing directly the state of peace-keeping.

Related: Extension of the Louvre Museum in Paris, by Zaha Hadid; The White Cube.

Jean Nouvel - Louvre Museum, Abi Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Jean Nouvel - Louvre Museum, Abi Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Jean Nouvel - Louvre Museum, Abi Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Jean Nouvel - Louvre Museum, Abi Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

Jean Nouvel - Louvre Museum, Abi Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

The Japanese architectural firm SANAA rightly have the adulation of the world's press bestowed upon them. After a steady, sure ascendancy over the last decade or so, they've now joined the big league with their recent New Museum of Modern Art on New York's Bowery.

However, this excellent book by the Barcelona/New York-based publisher Actar concentrates on what might actually be a more important aspect of their portfolio - houses. For as good as the New Museum appears to be - I haven't seen it, but it is by all accounts a great bit of building - we should be carefully questioning the value of innovation in museum or gallery design.

It's not that there aren't fine, adventurous buildings emerging that take advantage of those cities chasing the sometimes elusive Guggenheim effect. (cf. Steven Holl's Block Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.) And the civic aspects of galleries and museums are indeed vital and valuable for cities. But when this largely well-understood design problem gets solved anew, the attention it gets is slightly out of proportion.

For housing will always be a more valuable design problem. And from the perspective of Japanese architecture, and Japanese culture, it's perhaps the pivotal built form. Indeed, Kristine Guzmán claims here that "Japan's sociological unit is the home, not the family." Further, Japanese cities, often defined by density, provide a testbed for exploring ideas of habitation that should become increasingly relevant elsewhere. Particularly in those American and Australian cities that need to unlock their muscle memory for density, their sprawling perimeter eventually withdrawing from recently singed edges, folding in on themselves such that more people simply have to inhabit less space.

So these explorations in discreet, civil density are immensely valuable. To be clear, the buildings themselves won't translate simply to other cities, as the conditions are quite distinct. Urban Japan's societal norms and cultural values are still utterly unique. Several of the insightful essays here explore exactly what those values and conditions might be, all with varying degrees of success in terms of conveying them for an English-speaking audience. Some things will always be lost in translation, it would seem, and attempting to pin down Sejima and Nishizawa's work in one book of many photographs, one interview and three essays is like trying to nail jelly to a wall.  Moreover, if one could distill the essence of their work, you couldn't simply relocate it in another city. It's so different, so distinct. Equally, we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is the kind of affordable housing that many of our cities so badly need. These are mainly works for individual clients (even if SANAA explore ideas of communities of little dwellings within that, as with the Moriyama House, and their materials are often inexpensive.)

And yet, this book is about work of the highest build quality, incredibly interesting engineering and architectural approaches that might translate, and some overriding concerns and concepts that should be of value almost everywhere. Most of all, a focus on houses, and on houses that reinforce a civic sense of connection with the surrounding environment and the enveloping informational context, while reinforcing discretion, privacy, intimacy and flexibility, and often in a high density context of small plots and tight spaces. As such, it's a rejoinder to the kind of architectural journalism that focuses on the iconic free-standing residence. (Exhibit A: a collection of a certain kind of Australian architecture, featured in A+U, ironically, a Japanese publication. This depicts "the isolated object in the infinite landscape" as Philip Goad has it. Here, SANAA's houses are often connected objects in a very finite space indeed.)

This balance between the personal and the civic, in the city, is explored in almost every single project here (there are a few exceptions). The projects are grouped into unfinished and finished, with seven of the former and five of the latter, and are drawn from an exhibition at Museo de Art Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Each project is presented in drawings, photographs and models, with only a small paragraph describing each. As such, you're left somewhat adrift on the specifics of the projects. Yet, the projects are so obviously fascinating that this rather dry presentation inevitably shifts the reader into contemplative mode, meaning a far richer engagement with the work. I usually prefer more exposition rather than less, but on this occasion the blankness suits.

Blankness, or ideas of immateriality, translucency, weightlessness, and conjuring an innate simplicity are often to the fore in the exposition the book does offer up, in three contrasting essays by Guzmán, Luis Fernández-Galiano and Yuko Hasegawa. Novelist Haruki Murakami is even suggested as a totem in Fernández-Galiano's smart attempt to find some reference points for SANAA's work.

"His exploration of contemporary values through a hypnotic, jovial and surreal cocktail of lyrical levity, atmospheric sensuality and attention to material detail are perhaps a better parallel to SANAA's architecture."

Hasegawa's piece, 'Radical Practices in constructing Relationships', situates these houses in the context of SANAA's other work for museums and cultural centres, perhaps as you might expect from the curator of the Museum for Contemporary Art in Tokyo. It's useful, but rather side-steps the subject of this book.

Kristine Guzmán's is the most useful essay, moving easily through the multiple notions of 'Japan-ness' (after Arata Isozaki) that SANAA play with. She places Sejima and Nishizawa's work after that of Kenzo Tange and Tadao Ando, in terms of "integrating the aesthetic values of traditional Japanese architecture within a modern architecture." Guzmán suggests this may be "unconscious", though there's a revealing passage in the interview with Agustin Pérez Rubio that opens the book:

Nishizawa: "We are very much influenced by Japanese architecture. We have just never tried to quote directly from the Japanese past."
Sejima: "We cannot avoid drawing some influences from Japanese tradition."
Nishizawa: "It is not an option we can take."

Guzmán's essay continues to explore the importance of the house, of transparency, harmony with nature, shifting spatial function over time, transcendence, emptiness, and the values that SANAA's work stands for. It's fascinating.

In following the work, all three essays lead the reader back to the front of the book, to want to go through the projects again. The aforementioned interview is also relevant, allowing the architects themselves to frame what follows.

The setting for the interview is as revealing as anything, however. It takes place at a table in the studio shared by three practices, which is later used for eating at, and had previously been used for a client meeting, and before that, model-making. This multi-functional use of space is one of the more distinctive features of the projects here. Again, in describing a domestic architecture that enables the program to shift through different spaces over time, SANAA describe the useful 21st century urban home, a place where working and living co-exist, where private and public twist around each other, where informational media potentially pervades every space, yet where there is still room for shielded reflection and a relationship with nature.

(This last aspect is an ever-present theme in these projects, with large white spaces dotted with splashes of pot plants and flowers. There's little reference of this in the texts, but it's clearly a preoccupation of SANAA's. Their 'House in a Plum Grove' is the most overt attempt to synthesise the edifice with its environment, but almost all these spaces are also urban gardens. It's wonderful.)

Elsewhere, gardens become living rooms become offices become playrooms become basketball courts. Sejima and Nishizawa are working with a contemporary urban culture here, but also aware of the informational qualities of that culture - in that a space's function is now also heavily influenced by the personal technology within it. As Guzmán puts it:

"The link between the idea of information culture and certain notion of flexibility is explained in the book Blurring Architecture by Toyo Ito, where he reflects on space in 21st century architecture based on the Modern Movement, and says that an architecture that serves as a bridge between a biological and electronic body must have "a floating nature that allows for changes over time (...) because in today's society it is absolutely essential to do away with borders based on simplified functions and establish a relationship of overlapping spaces."

This is why SANAA are quite so interesting. In drawing from civic architecture and public space - parks, libraries, museums - they imbue domestic spaces with informality, intermediate spaces, chance spaces, private spaces that shift easily to public and back again, the freedom to occupy a space with an unintended function - in a sense, providing a platform for multiple behaviours and histories. SANAA's projects become a series of metaphors for understanding how informational spaces and physical spaces are beginning to entwine.

Further, in doing this mostly in the tightest of urban contexts - their 'Small House' here has a site area of 60m²; a typical Australian plot has shifted from a rationed 134m² just after WWII to 264m² today, with 600m² not unheard of - SANAA give us an optimistic vision for high-density urban living that is innately civic. When viewed through that lens, this collection could provide a pattern book for concepts, to be interrogated by architects, planners and anyone else who cares about the modern city. The ideas need translating, and some certainly won't take elsewhere - just as this text occasionally feels a little slippery, presumably translated from Spanish and Japanese into English. But that's a useful lesson too.

It's not at all perfect, the Japanese city, but there is still much to draw from it. Sir Peter Cook spoke warmly about the Japanese take on urbanism in a recent interview - he described it as "naughty thinking". We could well use a global outbreak of this naughty urbanism.

A further point to draw from this work is that of craft. SANAA can achieve such lightness in their architecture only through manufacturing of the highest build quality. The sense of weightlessness of  'House in Plum Grove' comes from interior walls of structural steel plates that are only 10mm thick, and exterior walls that only 50mm thick. This devotion to detail is also a useful tenet to reinforce worldwide. It's why it is encouraging to see SANAA's museum project apparently succeed in New York, after many Japanese architects had found American contractors incapable of their craft.

So as SANAA and their projects inexorably grow in size, their skill with at the domestic scale should be especially lauded. That's why this book is actually more important than the slew of recent articles on the Bowery. It does an excellent job of documenting SANAA's work on houses, up to late 2006, and by respectfully leaving room for interpretation, it offers up numerous prompts for how functional and informational flexibility and density might be enabled through their sheer craft with material, space and program.

The book's photographs shifts in and out of focus, as if aping these ideas of blurring and graduating transparency (also sometimes due to being shots of models). Some photographs often feel flatter than 2D, somehow. This doesn't always add value, but essentially the projects are presented extremely well, often imaginatively framed, sometimes captured in the grainy cinéma-vérité of DV screengrabs, and usefully accompanied by plans and sketches.

Yet as Hasegawa, perhaps un-helpfully given the context, notes in his closing essay: "SANAA's architecture has many elements that are impossible to understand unless one actually 'experiences' it. In contrast with modern architecture, SANAA has many aspects that cannot be revealed in 'representative' media such as plans, models, and photographs." I've only 'experienced' one SANAA building - the breathtakingly graceful Dior store on Omotesando, Tokyo - and can thus extrapolate a little from my understanding of that.

But only a little. And though Hasegawa is essentially correct that representation cannot begin to approach the phenomenological depth of experience that  actually being there provides, the book is still ultimately composed of 'just' these "plans, models and photographs".

Certainly this key point - of documenting how the architecture enables change, multiple functions over time, and absorbs and responds to information flow - is rarely attempted, save for a few diagrams from the practice. It'd be interesting to hear more about how Sejima and Nishizawa might articulate these ideas, other than through their architecture. How might one represent that blurring, overlapping or "floating nature", as Toyo Ito has it. Information graphics, diagrams, automatic documentation? Ongoing Building Informational Modelling, forming a form of post-occupancy evaluation perhaps? Or film, even? Perhaps SANAA's architecture is too subtle to be so crudely pinned down. Either way, aside from the following images, the book rarely attempts it.

The design of the book is also drawn towards a purity of blankness, a floating abstract simplicity that sets the text gracefully in black sans- amidst white space. Photographs are generally full-bleed, with the most representative - of the book and the work itself - those of streetscapes or rooftops pinned down to the bottom of the book by the empty weight of the white Tokyo sky.

It's reminiscent of Yoshihiro Tatsumi's bleak, brilliant manga The Push Man, with the iconic Tokyo line:

"A pretty sky just gets me wound up, and my head starts pounding. The city doesn't need a sky."

The lack of ornament in that sky is mirrored in SANAA's houses below, as well as this book. Everywhere, the ancient Eastern notion of "omnipresent emptiness" that Guzmán refers to.

And so, room for people emerges.

果てしない時の中で　あなたとであぇたことが　　（在漫長無盡的時空中與你相遇）
何よりもあたしを強くしてくれたね　　（讓我學會了前所未有的堅強）
むちゅうでかける明日にたどり著いたとしても　　（即使某天我抵達了嚮往的明天）
あなたはずっと特別で　大切で　　（你始終是特別的　重要的）
またこの季節が　やってくる　　（如同這個季節　將再次來臨）


いつまでも忘れないと　　　（無論何時都不會忘記）
あなたが言ってくれた夏 　　　（自從你如此對我說的夏天）
時間が流れ　　　（時光已匆匆流逝）
今頃あたしは涙がこぼれてきた 　　　（直到今日我才不禁嘆然落淚）


あなたとすごした日々を　このぬねにやきちけよう　　（把與你共度的時光銘刻在心底）
思い出さなくても大丈夫なように　　（不必刻意回憶也不會把你忘記）
いつか他のだれかを好きになったとしても　　（即使有一天我喜歡上了別人）
あなたはずっと特別で大切で　　（你始終是特別的　重要的）
またこの季節が　めぐってく　　（如同這個季節　將循環不息）

　　故事讲述名叫绀野真琴的17岁普通高中生，在一次车祸后，获得了穿越时空的能力。经过多次练习真琴掌握了穿越时空的方法，经常用这个方法来解决生活中的麻烦事。

　　真琴和同班的两个男生——间宫千昭以及津田功介非常要好，三人一直是好朋友。而千昭突然向真琴表白爱意，令她十分困扰。真琴用穿越时空回到过去的方法抹消了这次告白，她希望能一直和他们保持好朋友的关系。不料，同学友梨向千昭告白，而暗恋功介的果步又找真琴来商量。为了帮助朋友真琴不断用穿越时空的能力，但事情反而越来越乱……

绀野真琴本来是原作中不存在的人物，也是电影中的原创人物。他的姑母，古板的令人难以理解的单身女性才是原作的主人公。至于为什么舍弃姑母凭空杜撰出一个女子高中生主角来，谁都明白个中道理吧！

主题曲
ガーネット (剧场用アニメーション「时をかける少女」主题歌)

奥华子 (アーティスト)

Pan's Labyrinth, titled in Spanish as El Laberinto del Fauno, is a 2006 horror / fantasy film directed by Guillermo del Toro. The film premiered in the 2006 Cannes Film Festival and is expected to release in American theaters on December 29, 2006. The film has been chosen as Mexico's entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 79th Academy Awards. [1]

Plot

In a post-Civil War northern Spain in 1944, a 12-year-old girl, Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), moves with her heavily-pregnant mother and stepfather into a new home in the countryside. Her stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi López) has been posted to this remote area to rid it of rebels. Disliked by the sadistic Vidal, Ofelia, who revels in ancient stories and fairytales, discovers an immense and ancient labyrinth guarded by a Faun (Doug Jones). He tells her she is the long-lost daughter of the king of a magical land, and to regain entry to her kingdom she must carry out three tasks. So Ofelia enters a strange and no less dangerous world of fairies and extraordinary creatures such as the terrifying Pale Man (Doug Jones).

Cast

Influences

Del Toro has said the film has strong connections in theme to The Devil's Backbone and should be seen as an informal sequel dealing with some of the issues raised there^[1]. In 2004 Del Toro said: "Pan is an original story. Some of my favorite writers (Borges, Blackwood, Machen, Dunsany) have explored the figure of the God Pan and the symbol of the labyrinth. These are things that I find very compelling (remember the labyrinth image on HELLBOY??) and I am trying to mix them and play with them." Some of the works he drew on for inspiration include Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan and The White People, Lord Dunsany's The Blessing of Pan, Algernon Blackwood, Pan's Garden, and Francisco Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son ^[2].

See also

• Works influenced by Alice in Wonderland

Footnotes

生日：1941年1月5日

出生地：東京都文京區

學歷：1963年畢業於學習院大學政治經濟學部

經歷：1958年時正當高三的宮崎駿受到日本第一部長篇彩色動畫電影「白蛇傳」的感動，讓本是漫畫迷的他開始對動畫發生興趣。大學畢業後於1963年進入東映動畫株式會社工作。著手製作了「狼少年KEN」(‘63年)﹑「貓熊家族」(‘68年)﹑「太陽王子華倫斯的冒險」(‘73年)等電視卡通，「太陽王子華倫斯的冒險」成為後來日本動畫發展的里程碑。 ’73年與高[火田]勳一起跳槽，之後到過TELECOM，此後曾製作「小天使」、「尋母三千里」、「苦兒流浪記」等作品。1978年替ＮＨＫ製作電視卡通「未來少年柯南」開始受到矚目。1979「魯邦三世」電影版上映，可說是此系列最佳的電影。'82年自立門戶，'84年成立二馬力動畫事務所，同年「風之谷」電影版上映，獲得空前的成功，這時才成為家喻戶曉的人物。’86年與高[火田]勳成立GHI-BLI工作室 (吉卜力工作室)，1997年「魔法公主」上映，並宣稱將會是他最後一部動畫長片，但2001年的「神隱少女」再度復出，並積極培養接班人。2003年「神隱少女」在獲得無數國際電影獎項之後又獲得奧斯卡最佳動畫與土星獎最佳動畫兩大獎項，將宮崎駿的國際聲望與事業推上另一高峰。