If central casting came up with a French superstar architect, itcouldn`t do better than Jean Nouvel: dressed all in black, with a framethat unashamedly confesses to years of long lunches and a face that,despite his usual geniality, looks perpetually sneery, topped with ashiny dome of a head. In person he plays the part to a T. He speaksevery word like a manifesto, as if it were rooted in his heart.

Today`stopic for Nouvel`s intellectual rhetoric is the difference between thegreat architect and the great artist. A new exhibition, curated anddesigned by Nouvel about his late friend, the artist César, opens nextweek at the Fondation Cartier, in Paris, which Nouvel himself built 14years ago. “César would come to the openings of my buildings and he`dsay: ‘Ah, we artists, we are nothing. When I make something 6m tall Ithink it so big, but you build 50m high.`

“But I explained,these are not the right parameters. Artists are always the laboratoryfor the first ideas, the first emotions. Architects take emotions fromthe streets, the art galleries, the museums; they steal. I have a lotof compromises. César could do exactly what he wanted.” And so he did,crushing cars into neat, colourful oblongs, or making enormousplasticky globules.

Architects often wish they were artists, andNouvel is of the artier kind. He grew up in medieval Sarlat, insouth-west France, the son of school teachers. His parents didn`t thinkmuch of his ambition to become a painter. They favoured something morepractical. Today he has found the perfect compromise. He runs an officeof 100, is in his sixties - the most fertile period for an architect -and, at last, he has the recognition of his peers. Last month inWashington he collected the Pritzker Prize, architecture`s highesthonour.

He is now in a purple patch of commissions: concert halls in Parisand Copenhagen; an outpost of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi; in Qatar askyscraper and an extension to the National Museum; in New York anapartment tower and, perhaps his most prestigious new commission, the75-storey Tour de Verre, a soaring, slim pinnacle of a skyscraperbeside the Museum of Modern Art. Even architecturally xenophobicBritain has belatedly fallen for his charms, with a massive officecomplex, One New Change, rising in one of the most sensitive sites inthe country, abutting St Paul`s Cathedral.

And he has done allthis while retaining a conceptual approach that would please anyartist. “For me it is the idea,” he booms. “The concept, that iseverything. I don`t design a lot, or work with models.” He disdains thecomputer - “it has no emotion, no feeling” - and even the pencil: “Icraft with words.” Most of his day is spent debating, describing,cajoling, using words to get across his concepts. He even employs anin-house critic off whom to bounce ideas. “Analysis is everything,” hesays. “But at the same time, I don`t want to be only an architect ofpaper. I fear I am a little bit, because I lost so many projects.”

Ahyes. The lost projects, an inevitable consequence of life at the artierend of architecture. In the early Nineties Nouvel lost what`s becomeone of the most famous unbuilt buildings of modern times, the Tour SansFin, a cigarette-thin 1,300ft skyscraper in Paris, whose skin graduatedfrom dark granite via steel and aluminium to ethereal glass, so seemingto dissolve into the clouds. Soon after, his firm was bankrupt and hehas been paying off the debts ever since. Last month he had finalvindication: a commission for the Tour Signal, a skyscraper close tothe Sans Fin site, but with a different concept - skygardens - “Icannot repeat!” he cries.

Even when built, though, his worklurches between brilliance and balderdash. The Musée du Quai Branly{2006} was a dog`s dinner. There were beautiful fragments, but thewhole was cumbersome, heavy and poorly detailed. His e
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