Jean Nouvel

The exhibition marks the first time Pritzker Prize-winning French architect Jean Nouvel has staged a solo show inside a building of his own design. It is also MAP’s first architecture-focused exhibition since the museum opened five years ago. Presented as part of MAP’s fifth-anniversary programming, the show is billed as the largest solo exhibition of Nouvel’s work to date. It brings together more than 400 architectural projects and 100 design archives from across his five-decade career.

The exhibition is organized into two main sections, Architecture and Design. The architecture section includes well-known projects such as the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the National Museum of Qatar in Doha. The design section focuses on more than 100 furniture and industrial design pieces produced since 1987. Rather than presenting Nouvel’s work solely through drawings and models, the exhibition includes films, archival documents, reconstructed studio settings, and several large-scale moving-image installations. According to the museum, the show also looks at Nouvel’s longstanding interest in context, particularly the ways architecture responds to specific geographic, cultural, and urban conditions.