Jean Nouvel: About Designing

Members of the high-tech movement, of which Jean Nouvel (b. 1945) is undoubtedly a significant part, are often criticized for the weak conceptual or philosophical foundation of their work. Aside from a few rigid technological dogmas (mass production, dry assembly, nothing but metal, glass, and plastics, mobility, self-building structures, etc.), most high-tech architects evidently suffice with a simple belief in the goodness of technical and civilizational progress. Nouvel represents an exception. He also appears as a pure, albeit somewhat more skeptical and wiser progressive. However, he differs from other high-tech architects in his relentless effort to give his work a deeper conceptual basis. In the chaos of today's world, according to Nouvel, the architect cannot orient himself without the help of modern science and philosophy. Reading the texts of contemporary French philosophers - Foucault, Guattari, Deleuze - gives Nouvel's work a different direction than the overly stylistic and overly visual one that philosopher Jacques Derrida inadvertently inspired in the architecture of deconstructivism. Modern philosophy teaches Nouvel to think about the realities of today's world, providing order and substance to his design methods and concepts. Nouvel's way of thinking, volatile, not always focused and coherent, yet interspersed with clever points and aphorisms, is encapsulated in the translation of the second part of his essay "On designing," published in October 1992 in the magazine Domus.
(...) Architecture has evolved from Plato's or Aristotle’s demand for ideal beauty to Hegel - who will be remembered for saying that architecture is the first of all the arts, but that it also contains the least thinking - and then from positivism to modernism. We were told that architecture is the art of organizing space, or rather, through a more plastic and lyrical vision, that it is a wise, precise, and magnificent etc. ... game. If we were to define architecture today, we would begin with what architecture is not. Modern architecture wanted to shape the world. In this, it failed. It had excessively grand ambitions and failed to understand the fact that it is not the world that belongs to the architect, but rather that the architect is in the world. It did not understand that it is a modification and expansion of the world, the overcoming of chaos, an involuntary adventure. Thus, each epoch recalculates the weapons of its development in connection with the areas of knowledge that have the same characteristics. And in order to dare to undertake such a grand enterprise, such an involuntary adventure, it is essential to pass through the knowledge of thinking. For an architect, it is never easy to delve into philosophy or to identify with its perspective. As for my own contribution, I have always worked with the transposition (migration) of concepts, and it is true that I have found many management rules and research methods in Michel Foucault. I especially valued values tied to language, which are very effective as methods of investigation: discontinuity, exteriority, specificity, inversion... These concepts refine the rules of formation that lead to the concept. Today I am trying to expand this research. After Foucault, I found much that is interesting as well as a shade of anxiety in the works of philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, especially in the book What is Philosophy? They talk about concept, percept, and affect, while I spoke about concept, perception, emotion. And I realized that I may have misused the term concept when I read that it is reserved solely for philosophy. But then, when I read that “there is no simple concept. All concepts have an infinite number of components... It’s multiplicity. When we say that a concept has irregular outlines defined by the number of its components, that each concept is a history, that all concepts have elegance, that each concept should be conceived as a point of contact and condensation of its own components,” I understood that this could also be said about a purely architectural concept. That there could be correspondence between the world of philosophy and the world of architecture, even though the architectural concept differs in that its object is not formulated but produced, or that its goal lies in achieving reality. And the question of reality takes us back to the investigation of the physical world. When a philosopher says that philosophy progresses through concept, science through perspective, and art through percept and affect, it prompts us to work with perspective: with what pertains to science. Here we might recall the provocative words of Martin Heidegger: "Science does not think." It might not be out of place. We may sometimes be struck by doubts when today we see what appears as mathematics with its ingenuity, its strategies, or theories associated with falsificationism, presented as preliminary narratives, as if they were stories conveyed where we should read to the point of a given
textual segment. We then understand that some of these research methods might have architectural significance. Whenever we see an image capable of explaining, for example, the concepts of fractions, repetition, a mathematical process leading to infinity, infinities of forms, or to the geometrization of meaning evoked by Thom's theory of catastrophes, we realize that for us architects, as traders of images, such an ideograph connected with science establishes an extraordinary foundation. Science provides the conditions for the transformation of ideas. Science repeats the material, the spark that can ignite philosophy and art just as art and architecture on the borders of all these disciplines. To put it more directly, the architect, a man of reality, whether he wants it or not, must daily realize the contribution of science to the development of techniques and materials and to the birth of new technologies that serve as a so-called offer for his demand. This vague awareness today turns architecture into a synergy of all performances. We could today emphasize the change that has taken place in the relationships between architects and engineers and compare it with a different modernity where technology no longer has the dazzling quality it had in the heroic age of modern architecture. Technical courage has lost its value as a symbol. The best engineers in the world paradoxically seek their best role in supplementary work (which is only supplementary relatively, as it does not detract from their prestige or authority). Architecture is recapitulating its nature. It is no longer exclusively driven by the randomness and realities of construction. If it connects with the goal of provoking percepts and affects, then architecture and the visual arts share common means: the production of images, materials..., from which it does not follow that an architect must necessarily and aprioristically require conditions that an artist has to justify his choice. Architecture is an art based on restraint. Unlike the artist, the architect has received a precise social role, which lies in the cultural definition of knowledge applied to public or any other shared space. His social role is already such, but the ambition of every architect should also consist in becoming a great artist. They should, however, be somewhere in the lower layer, but they should be real. If percepts and affects emerge at the moment when material and image are placed in perspective concerning the world (their entry into the world), the research of all fields and forms offers the architect an extraordinarily rich foundation. However, the architect should not copy the artist but should explore together with him the boulevards he has opened. Modifications and extensions of the world, the synergy of performances, sensations, and emotions expressing this phase of civilization: architecture in its desires, but also in its mechanisms offers more than one point of contact with cinema, a parallel I have often evoked through a few examples: the necessity to create cultural brakes is common, yet to be outside the range of economic and statutory situations. It is also a fact, and indeed primarily so, that both of these disciplines produce images. When an architect absorbs knowledge about cinema, he gains so much. If it was partly a monument, as I said earlier, now architecture has opened up to assume a broader social role: to develop, change, and expand the world. Its lack in the face of urban situations leads to its renunciation of designing cities as architecture, which cannot simply be translated as an acknowledgment of impotence. The city itself no longer simply corresponds to the definitions of the past: it is a city-cosmos, a multi-centered nebula. Its possible development should be imagined. Outside this nebula, whose parts are in a process of continuous establishment or dissolution, possible developmental movements must be evaluated, whether these processes will accompany, or conversely, contrast with them. I am convinced that if we finally add them to planning, to the general rules of zoning, these nebulae can only develop through repetition or transformation, or through new revelation. Repetition means that the city should be accepted as it is - as a given place - and should be modified within this framework. Transformation means that change can be brought about through replacement or erasure. New revelation means “to point out” additional possible interpretations that have been reached under different conditions. Indispensable approaches also include integration and differentiation. Architects must choose. But the position in which they can make a choice with good conscience will be occupied by conceptual architects, those who have taken analysis and research of possibilities to the extreme. Another expansion of the field of architecture lies in the fact that architecture is now becoming not only a sketch but also a strategy of behavior. It plays with the nature of behavior that it induces, but also with the nature of aesthetics. With its contribution to the functionality of devices and equipment, to aesthetics and joy, the carriers of which are all these things, an architect can change life and travel in the meeting of research theories. I think, for example, of the aesthetics associated with rock and with sports. Both disciplines are moving towards defining themselves in readable ways of adherence... Before I finish: It is time to stop certain stupid processes against modernity, as if it were the enemy of History. Modernity is the best possible utilization of our memory. It is a choice of the right direction at a given historical moment, a choice of the highest possible speed in the sense of the development of knowledge. Modernity is alive, mobile, evolving. For its time, I find Sigfried Giedion’s definition to be still appropriate: "Architecture is a strict art, subject to commanding laws, which concern not just material, but far more significantly also form. Architecture does not rejoice in absolute freedom; it is born and dies within the boundaries defined by each historical period and within the framework of eternal laws to which all architecture belongs. The essence of architecture lies in how it is perfected within its own boundaries." I enjoy returning to Giedion's assertions and realizing how in this return my own assertion is reflected: "Architecture is not a strict art subject to commanding laws. Its quality is independent of material and form. Material and form are becoming less and less important. In the fragmented city, it enjoys great freedom of expression. Architecture transcends its boundaries, traditionally defined by the historical epoch, and adapts its laws to development. The true essence of architecture lies in transcending its boundaries.

From Nouvel’s text “On designing”, Domus 742, October 1992, pp. 26-28
Reprinted in the magazine Architekt 19/1996, pp. 52-53
Translated by Rostislav Švácha