"I'm a contextualist architect, or at least I try to be. Building somewhere is always an adventure: finding the genius, the spirit of the place, the connections with history or geography. In this adventure, it is of course very useful to surround yourself with people who have known the place for a long time. Nevertheless, I would argue that on a project, you always have to combine things seen from the inside with things seen from the outside. The first impression of a city is very important. After that, you get used to it and then you don't have the same vision. The teams that form for each project are always based on this cross-fertilisation of views and sensations; we try to open up a dialogue between those who live the place and those who discover it.
Every project is first and foremost a meeting of minds before it is a meeting of places. As far as I'm concerned, someone has to share with me a desire to create something. There are lots of places like that where I've arrived simply because I wanted to work with someone.
Now, of course, there are mythical cities. For an architect, building in Manhattan is fabulous. It's such a piece of twentieth-century architectural history that everyone dreams of doing something in a Golden Triangle like that. The same goes for London, Berlin, Paris and Tokyo. The same goes for Rio, where I almost did the Guggenheim. For me it was a dream: the relief, the expression, the relationship with plants... everything is fabulous in Rio.
I remain a lover of diversity and I wouldn't even know which city I prefer. Of course, there are places where I would be less inclined to build. Because they've already been sabotaged, because their starting points aren't solid and because, by going there, I'd feel like I was taking part in a big mistake. As for the rest, I have the idea that the only point in going somewhere is to make yourself useful; to enrich the place by bringing a testimony, the expression of an attitude at a given time. A city is made up of a succession of layers of testimonies, and you want to be part of that.
As far as our times are concerned, 'sustainable development' has become a sort of cream pie, but it remains an essential awareness. For me, it means first and foremost not burdening the lives of our children and grandchildren by building things that will later become burdensome to maintain, difficult to demolish and made of poor quality materials. This realisation is, of course, a moral one, but it is also a hedonistic one. Because it's better to leave our descendants something that is a pleasure to live in, that respects our history and our own image.
Four dates
1945 Born in Fumel, Lot-et-Garonne.
1966 Enters the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, from which he graduates six years later.
1981 Wins the competition for the Arab World Institute. Other major projects followed: Nemausus in Nîmes, the Lyon Opera, the Lucerne Culture and Convention Centre, the Cartier Foundation, the Agbar Tower in Barcelona, the Quai Branly Museum in Paris...
2008 Awarded the Pritzker Prize.
