KKL Luzern (Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre)

Lucerne's nineteenth-century concert hall was acoustically compromised and had to go, but the city also needed to keep hosting its summer music festival without a gap year, so Nouvel's replacement, won in a 1989 competition, had to be built in stages around a functioning institution on a tight lakefront site between the railway station and the water. His solution roofs three largely separate buildings — a 1,840-seat concert hall tuned by the acoustician Russell Johnson with a reverberation chamber behind the stage, a congress centre, and the Kunstmuseum Luzern art museum — under a single thin steel roof measuring 110 by 105 metres, cantilevered out over the lake and a cut canal so that water appears to run beneath the building itself. Construction proceeded in phases from 1995 so the concert hall could open in August 1998 while work continued elsewhere; the complex was completed in 2000. Nouvel's design earned Lucerne's Kultur- und Kongresszentrum the Borromini Prize in 2001.