Jean Nouvel Workshops: the architect, the accountant and the vanished millions

This is the story of a French artist who became a star. A man who received the Pritzker Prize in 2008, a sort of Nobel Prize in the field of architecture, which rewarded this "insatiable desire for experimentation" that he demonstrated throughout his career. That of Jean Nouvel, this is him, really took off when the left entrusted him with the project of the Arab World Institute, to continue to all the summits, from Paris (Fondation Cartier, musée du Quai-Branly, Philharmonie...) to Abu Dhabi (Louvre) via Berlin, Barcelona, ​​Sydney, Tokyo, New York... A career where the art of playing with transparency was not absent. A work where necessarily the great, not to say the grandiose, also demands a mind in love with detail, a millimetric concern for precision.

The architect clearly did not abuse these qualities in the management of his "Atelier", since that is what his company is called. "Light without shadow does not exist", Jean Nouvel once confided to Libération . It is this hidden side that the Libération investigation focused on , between an unreasonable lifestyle, a pox-ridden entourage, a miracle buyer and the culpable accounting frivolity of our chief architect. In mid-December, the Paris prosecutor's office requested that several former employees of the Atelier Jean Nouvel be sent to criminal court, including its former administrative and financial director. The architect himself has not been charged, he escaped prosecution, but has been placed under the status of assisted witness. The courts are referring to false invoices issued in very, very large quantities over the years, as well as "massive" embezzlement of money. Jean Nouvel has long argued for the great gap between the artistic demands of a discipline that expands space and time and the down-to-earth contingencies of a scorecard entrusted to others. A bit short. And above all dangerous to continue flirting with the summits. Even fueled by "an insatiable desire for experimentation."