His first building that gained public attention was the Val Notre Dame clinic in Bezons (1978-80). But the project that thrust Jean Nouvel into the international eye was the Institut du Monde Arabe (1981-1987), built in collaboration with the agency Architectures-Studio and awarded the 1987 Équerre d'argent d'Architecture du Moniteur as the best French building of the year. Jean Nouvel belongs to the tradition of multidisciplinary architects who can design innovative solutions on every scale from the urban to the domestic. To effectively coordinate this approach, in the early 1990s, he founded the Ateliers Jean Nouvel (AJN), which today boasts a multicultural and multidisciplinary team of about 130. In 1995 he added the Jean Nouvel Design agency dedicated to product, interior and set design, as well as visual communications.
Jean Nouvel's work as a product designer grew out of his primary need to create objects to inhabit his architecture. The Less table by Unifor (1994), a division of Molteni & C., designed for the Cartier Foundation, and the LessLess table collection (2016) are emblematic of this approach. His long and fruitful collaboration with Molteni & C. resulted in such products as the Graduate bookcase (2003) and the Skin seating collection (2007). Nouvel has also worked with other prestigious brands including Abet Laminati, Danese, Cassina, Moroso, Bonacina, Poltrona Frau, to name but a few. For Ernesto Meda, he created the Corian® Nouvel Lumières kitchen (2007); for Arflex, he invented the original KNP sofa (2014); for MDF, he designed the Super_Position bookcase system (2018). He also created the Mia collection of garden chairs and tables for Emu (2012) and the Objective (2013) and Equilibrist (2014) lamps for Artemide. More recent products include the NVL table by MDF Italia (2020) and the Jumper collection by VS, which comprises the modular, stackable Jumper Studio Table and the Jumper Ply office chair (2021).