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With his addition to the Reina Sofia National Museum Art Center in Madrid, Jean Nouvel has set himself the challenge of working in shadow, defying the idea that architecture, as Le Corbusier famously wrote in Toward a New Architecture, is "the masterly, correct, and magnificent play of forms brought together in light." Nouvel has completely covered his project--three independent pavilions arranged around a central court--with a hovering plane of polished, lacquered aluminum, which extends from the museum's existing building "like a shadow," as he puts it. The 86,000-square-foot canopy offers welcoming shade on Madrid's hot and cloudless summer days, at the cost of throwing the project into gloom during the long winter months--although Nouvel has punctured the roof in places to reveal patches of sky and admit shafts of light into the court. "It's a lightweight wing the color of red roof tiles," the architect elaborates, "a wing that is friendly and protective, showing visitors that it is watching over them."
Without the play of light and shadow, Nouvel had to turn to alternative modeling strategies, capturing reflections and indirect light through the use of painted metal, glass, and other shiny or transparent surfaces, as well as color and night lighting. The exterior materials include bright red polyester tiles on the auditorium pavilion, galvanized metal grilles, and custom-extruded, red aluminum louvers. This mechanistic construction, typical of Nouvel's work, is closer in spirit to the contemporary city's caravan of cars and buses than to Madrid's traditional masonry buildings, including the original museum, an immense mass of granite and stucco-finished brick.
First opened in 1986, the Reina Sofia occupies an 18th-century hospital, a forbidding 265,000-square-foot structure, designed in 1769 by Francesco Sabatini, the court architect to King Charles III. Just a few blocks from the Prado Museum, it houses a comprehensive collection of 20th-century Spanish art (including Picasso's Guernica), which attracts 1.5 million visitors a year. In 1990, as part of an intervention directed by Spanish architects Jose Luis Iniguez de Onzono and Antonio Vazquez de Castro, British architect Ian Ritchie memorably added frameless glass elevator towers to the entry facade. Nine years later, the museum held a limited competition with the goal of drawing secondary activities out of the main building to free up space...