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 |  | Like many seaports, Le Havre, France’s second-largest harbour town, continually reaches toward the sea. New quays are presently being built out of town at the mouth of the Seine for supertankers and container ships. The docks closer in to the town, on the other hand, are largely standing empty, waiting to be put to new use. One example of this is Jean Nouvel’s Bains des Docks.
The exterior of this massive block, made from gleaming black glazed pre-cast concrete parts and with irregular aluminium windows, would fit into any future office or commercial district as seamlessly as it fits into the harbour district. The interior, however, avoids conformity, with a fascinating and occasionally irritating multiplicity of rooms and corridors, pools and sitting and reclining areas.
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The only ordering element – apart from the building’s overall cubic form – is the large 50 metre pool. This is inside the building, but in the open air. The white-painted facades that surround it, with their niches and irregularly distributed windows, demonstrate what Nouvel aimed to produce through his design: a sculpture on a grand scale but intricately detailed, whose nooks and crannies offer visitors all the seclusion they need. While many of his colleagues would like to see the right angle and bare white wall abolished, the French Pritzker Prize winner rehabilitates both to impressive effect. One of his models was Eduardo Chillida’s cycle of sculptures Elogio de la Luz. Like the Basque sculptor, Nouvel allows daylight to fall into the interior through deep incisions in the building’s shell, where it is reflected and refracted in all directions by floors, pools and seating elements laid with white mosaic tiles. As well as the competition pools, the Bains des Docks include a leisure pool with an indoor and outdoor area, two children’s pools and an area for balneotherapy.
The fitted-together design of the pools is largely based on natural formations in the sinter terraces of Pamukkale in Turkey. As in Pamukkale, the brilliant white surfaces and the turquoise water of Jean Nouvel’s baths are the subdued colour palette against which the colourful crowd of bathers are set.
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