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FRANCE-ARCHITECTURE-MUSIC-LITIGATION
French architect Jean Nouvel workshop sues Paris concert hall
PARIS, Oct 21, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Top architect Jean Nouvel is suing one of
his former clients, the Philharmonie concert hall in Paris, in a dispute over
the cost of building the venue, which opened in 2015.
In a complaint filed in the Paris court on October 14, his company
Ateliers Jean Nouvel counters a 170 million euro ($190 million) claim lodged
by the Philharmonie de Paris against his company.
The concert hall argues the architect’s firm owes them the money because
of budget overruns during the building of the hall, sources told AFP Monday.
But the counter-claim filed by the architect’s studio describes that
demand as “exorbitant” and “unjustified”, according to documents seen by AFP.
The cost of the building rose from 173 million euros when the project was
announced in 2006 to 386 million euros by the time it opened on January 14,
2015. Each side blames the other for having mismanaged the project.
In April 2017, the body responsible for managing the concert hall sent a
bill of 170.6 million euros to the architect, which included penalties for
late delivery.
For Ateliers Jean Nouvel, this claim was “totally disproportionate not
only in the absolute but also relative to the sums that were actually
received” by the architect, which according to the legal document seen by AFP
came to 12 million euros.
Nouvel’s lawyers, William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth, said the claim
against their client was all the more unusual for the fact that the concert
hall was targeting only the architect and no other business involved in the
project.
The Philharmonie was knowingly going after funds it knew were not owed,
they argued.
Nouvel and the Philharmonie have been in engaged in a very public war of
words in the media and the courts since the concert hall’s inauguration.
Nouvel refused to attend the event, insisting that work on the building
was not ready.
At the time Nouvel, who won architecture’s top global award, the Pritzker
Prize, in 2008, wrote a lengthy complaint about the affair published in the
daily Le Monde.
BSS/AFP/GMR/1141 hrs