ANGEL CITY (PRAGUE-SMICHOV)Jean Nouvel’s Golden Angel office tower in Prague is scheduled to open in November 2000, but it has already weathered official and unofficial criticism for more than ten years. The building is a prelude to Nouvel’s more ambitious Angel City plan, which when completed will encompass 60,000 square meters of office space, 9,000 square meters of retail and 10,000 square meters of apartments and recreational space.
Criticism of Golden Angel, primarily from local architects, has focused on its scale, materials, and imagery. Golden Angel, actually 4 linked buildings, will feature a white-and-grey concrete frame visible beneath the 32.5-meter glass outer wall of the main façade. The building varies from 5 to 7 storeys and is linked by covered walkways and passages. Nouvel has incorporated the image of a guardian angel on the facade of the tower, which faces the Vltava River and the 10th-century ruins of Vysehrad on the opposite bank. The proposed “angel,” controversially, is a still of Bruno Ganz, the actor-angel from Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Wings of Desire. The wrap-around glass facade will also feature images of clouds drifting across the glass curtain wall and snippets of Czech poetry on the subject of angels.
(For the full-bore scandal surrounding the planning origins of this project, plus the awe-inspiring machinations of the current Czech architectural scene, see Scandal in Bohemia.)
Golden Angel is sited on a main thoroughfare in Smichov -- an aging 500-acre industrial sector of the city -- and sits above the Andel (Angel) subway station that serves upwards of 20,000 passengers a day. The structure will include 13,000 square meters of office space and 7,000 square meters of retail. Scheduled retail components include a department store, a Dutch supermarket franchise, numerous small shops plus a 224-space parking garage.
Funded by the Dutch-Swiss financial services consortium ING, the same firm that brought Prague the controversial Frank Gehry-Vlado Milunic Dancing Building (a.k.a. the Fred and Ginger Building), Golden Angel is expected to cost $27 to $28 million. It will be the first step toward transforming Smichov into an alternative city center, less for the millions of tourists that descend on Prague each year than for besieged locals.
Nouvel’s 1985 planning study for Smichov is representative of the architect’s theory of “spot intervention,” or strategic insertions meant to release latent urban energy (“urban acupuncture”). Nouvel’s Angel City, immediately behind Golden Angel, will include a multiplex cinema, restaurants, small shops, a bowling alley and apartments. A third non-Nouvel component, New Smichov, yet to be fully funded, is also planned. Construction is ready to start, given the immense hole in the ground at the site of a former Tatra car parts factory.
Gavin Keeney (Summer 1999)
Photo by GK, circa 2001 ...
UPDATES & OUTTAKES
As of June 2001 the first section of Angel City is complete, including Golden Angel, and the second portion is fast approaching closure. The Angel building is extraordinary and may be seen from long views along Karmelistska Street approaching Smichov from Mala Strana. The angel, after all the fuss, is, in fact, Bruno Ganz and he is pensively gazing down at the busy intersection of the working class neighborhood. The shops in the ground floor sections of the complex are filled with upper-echelon consumer goods and may help slake the profound desire for immediate gratification felt by the post-communist populace. A book recounting the evolution of the project was published by Zlaty Rez (Golden Section), Zlaty Andel: Jean Nouvel v Praze (Prague, 2000), Cloth, ISBN 8-090-15625-8
Regarding Jean Nouvel's Guggenheim, Rio de Janeiro (2002), inclusive of Patrick Blanc's "Vertical Garden" ("In ancient times the garden was the place of best-kept secrets." --J.N.), see A+U 395 (2003:08), pp. 44-50 / See also, Jonathan Glancey on Nouvel's Périgueux's Musée Gallo-Romain (The Guardian Unlimited, 08/25/03)
Nouvel’s Golden Angel project was also published in El Croquis 112/113, “Jean Nouvel 1994-2002” (Madrid, 2002), pp. 100-111 / For the as-yet-unbuilt project ‘Riverside’ (also in Prague-Smichov), see Ibid., pp. 112-119 / Golden Angel also appears in schematic form (including an extremely cunning image of an abstract ‘box of clouds’) in El Croquis 65/66, “Jean Nouvel 1987-1998” (Madrid: 2000)- See p. 322 for this latter image ...
See also Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) - Paper, 160 pages, ISBN 0-816-63913-2 (Cloth, ISBN 0-816-63912-4 ) - “At some point, architecture is like poetry: you can provide all the interpretations of the poem you like, but it's always there. The object is literal in the sense that it is fully exhausted in itself. You no longer wonder about architecture or poetry; you have an object that literally absorbs you, that is perfectly resolved in itself. That is my way of expressing singularity." (Baudrillard) - For details, cliquez ici ...
"In contemporary architecture, the poetics of de-materialization play on surface mystery, uncertainty of perception, ambiguity and illusion to convey the ‘aesthetics of virtual reality’ that Jean Nouvel spoke of with regard to his Fondation Cartier, where tall dark glass panels reflect and multiply images and layers. Matter is thus not so much a means of defining the limits of the building as of liberating perception, introducing vibration and a host of changing and fragile readings, opening the way to the invisible and to emotion. In this ‘aesthetics of the miracle’ as described by the architect, mystery remains entire, the result is present but we are not aware of the means to achieve it, our emotion derives from perception of a building ‘set free’, which offers itself to our regard like an object, an inhabited painting.” --Salwa & Selma Mirou, “Oraisons modernes”, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui 356 (January-February 2005), p. 53
