An international team

The winning team contracted to design the Musée du Louvre-Lens brings together the Japanese architectural practice SANAA, the American museum architects Celia Imrey and Tim Culbert (co-designers), and the French landscape designer Catherine Mosbach. The research consultancies and economists are mainly French - Bétom, Hubert Pénicaud, Michel Forgue, Avel Acoustique, and Groupe Casso - but also include German (Transplan, Bollinger and Grohmann), British (Arup Lighting) and Japanese (Saps/Sasaki and Partners) companies.

Extra Muros in Paris (Michel Lévi and Antoine Saubot) and the Belin consultancy in Lens have been selected as on-site architects.

The SANAA agency

Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa founded the SANAA agency (Sejima And Nishizawa And Associates) in 1995.

Kazuyo Sejima was born in Miko in the Ibaraki region in 1956. She studied at the Japan Women's University, where she was awarded a master's degree. She began her career with Toyo Ito architects & associates (1981 to 1987), before going freelance in 1987 and founding SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa in 1995.

Ryue Nishizawa was born in Tokyo in 1966. In 1990 he was awarded a master's degree from the National University of Yokohama, where he now teaches. Kazuyo Sejima lectures at Keio University and has been a guest lecturer at the Harvard GSO and the ETH in Zurich.

Although Kazuyo Sejima began her career with the houses Platform I and II (1988, 1990), her clean, graphic designs met with great success in 1991 thanks to the large-scale project for the Saishunkan Seiyaku Women's Dormitory, collective lodgings for young female workers. In the latter half of the 1990s, she was frequently commissioned to design public buildings, such as the Gifu Kitagata Apartment complex (1988, 2000). However, she has never entirely given up designing single family homes.

In 2000, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa won the competition to design the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa. The museum, opened in 2004, has been praised for its esthetic and functional qualities and earned the architects international recognition. In 2006, they completed the Glass Pavilion, an extension of the museum of Toledo, USA. This design also enjoyed great critical success.

In parallel, the pair have continued experimenting with urban façades, as their 2003 design for the flagship Christian Dior store in Tokyo indicates.

Alongside the Musée du Louvre-Lens project, they are currently working on numerous projects in Japan, Switzerland, Germany, and Spain.

A sensitive, airy, and fluid design

Their architecture is innovative, airy, and fluid. It abolishes the weight of its materials and transcends the concept of space. The notion of a principal or secondary façade is often eliminated, replaced by an original conception which turns it into a membrane creating a subtle relationship between inner and outer space.

Their work is light and minimal in terms of esthetics, yet highly sophisticated in terms of detail and the technical aspects of building work. Their designs are driven by a deep desire to respect the building's context and to create a bold relationship with nature and the environment.

Principal references

N Museum - Wakahama - Japan - 1997
O Museum - Nagano - Japan - 1999
Christian Dior store in Omotesando - Tokyo - 2003
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art - Kanazawa - Japan - 2004
Glass Pavilion - Toledo - USA - 2006
Campus Novartis - Basel - Switzerland - 2006
Federal Polytechnic - Lausanne - Switzerland - 2006
Design school - Essen - Germany - 2006

Current projects

New Museum of Contemporary Art - New York - 2006

Catherine Mosbach, landscape designer

Catherine Mosbach is a graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure du paysage in Versailles (1986). Her principal projects include the archeological park in Solutré (Saône-et-Loire), the walk along the Saint-Denis canal, and the botanical gardens in Monaco and Bordeaux. She designed the La Bastide botanical gardens in Bordeaux, which opened in 2003. These gardens on the right bank of the Garonne, covering 4.6 hectares, are part of a new neighborhood being built to recover a former industrial wasteland.

Studio Adrien Gardère

Adrien Gardère is a French designer and museographer, born in 1972. Graduated from the 2 Paris schools, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratis (1996) and Ecole Boulle (1994), he set up the Studio Adrien Gardère in 2000, that features three areas of expertise: furniture and lighting design, museum and exhibition design, as well as interior architecture.

His personal experience and choices soon made him establish solid working partnerships with large institutions in Western and Eastern metropolises:
Cairo - Egypt (the Islamic Art Museum, the Egyptian National Museum, the Museum of Historic Cairo) - Washington DC - United States (the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts) - Ahmedabad - India (the National Institute of Design, India) - Surabaya - Indonesia (French Cultural Centre, Indonesia) - Teheran - Iran (the National Carpet Museum) ¬- Lisbon - Portugal (Design Museum, Centro do Belem) - Paris - France (the Musée du Louvre, the Museum of Decorative Arts, National Museum of Architecture and Heritage)
His creations result from a continuous analysis of contemporary practices and cultural contexts, and a dialogue between traditional skills and new techniques, between innovation and comfort, comprehension and emotion, scientific expertise and pedagogic goals.
His creations are produced by companies such as Artemide, Ligne Roset, Perimeter Editions, Krios Italia and Saazs.
The Studio objective is to create products, installations and spaces that are relevant, legitimate and clearly understandable.