Jean Nouvel

"Modernity is making the best use of our memory and moving ahead as fast as we can in terms of development"

"In todays modernity, what takes priority is the aesthetic of the miracle"

"we cannot refuse to add our own. It is indeed our responsibility to continue constructing it. "

"There are fundamental differences between architecture and design....The first is the fact that architecture is unique and can only be specific, wehreas design is the creation of multiples aimed at the multitude of individuals. The second is that architecture conveys a sense of the present; it will be up to future generations and the buildings that will be constructed around them whether or not it rematins meaningful. In the case of design, the reverse is true: design will be situated in different contexts, surrounded by objects unknown to it. In the case of architecture, the object is static. In the case of design, the object moves in space and time."

"we can create more than we see"

"architecture creates a virtual space or a mental space; it's a way of tricking the senses. But it's primarily a way of preserving a destabalized area."

"three quarters of the time architecture is not marked by any intentionallity'

"If being a nihilist is being obsessed by the mode of disappearance rather than the mode of production, then I'm a nihilist"

"we have experienced a kind of urban big bang and find that we are unable to use the existing recipes"

"we're required to constantly diagnose the situation, required to face the fact that architecture is no longer the invention of a world but that it exists simply with respet to a geologial layer applied to all the cities throughout the planet...architecture can no longer have as its goal the transformation, modification, of this accumulated material"

"I think through small movements we can achieve an ethics whereby the situation becomes slightly more positive each time we intervene. We can try to locate a kind of enjoyment of place by including things that weren't considered previously, which are frequently accidental, and inventing stratagies of improvement, the poetics of situations: we can evaluate completely random elements and declare that we're dealing with geography: "it's beautiful. I'm going to reveal it to you..." This is an aesthetics of revelation, a way of taking a piece of the world and saying, "I'm appropriating this, and I'm giving it back to you for your appreciation in a different way."