The man in black designing a Merry-Go-Round seems a jarring fit. But out on the Brooklyn waterfront buffeted by winds on a raw point between the muscular grandeur of the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, Nouvel seems just the right man to insinuate something as delicate as a life-size interactive music box into a setting as tough as the Brooklyn waterfront.

The contrasts were not lost on the architect who said shortly before the ribbon-cutting today that he wanted to make a shelter for the 1922 carousel that was “a little tender but not too cute and with a feeling for the poetry of the situation.” His original dream was to encase it all in glass but getting down to a more realistic budget, acrylic glass turned out to offer something even more interesting and close to the architect’s temperament: distortions. He dismissed concerns—shared by the client it turns out—that the acrylic would scratch and yellow:  “That’s the old acrylic,” he said.