An internationally acclaimed architect whose projects include the Musée du quai Branly, Paris and the forthcoming Louvre Abu Dhabi, Jean Nouvel maintains a parallel practice in design and interior architecture. His path to “starchitecturedom” began in the 1970s, when he became a key participant in the intellectual debate about architecture in France. He co-founded the Mars architectural movement in 1976, and the Syndicat de l’Architecture in 1977. By the mid-1980s, he opened the first of his evolving practices. Nouvel considers himself an architect and a designer; he creates furniture, furnishings, carpets and flooring, and wearable and kitchen accessories. Their bold, streamlined forms derive from those of his buildings and from his focus on the elemental, as he describes: “The key word of my work is elementariness. I look primarily for the essence of things; I would like to invent archetypes.”