ernal coherence of form, as seen effortlessly in the Museum on Quai Branly in Paris, where the construction of a forest generates an ensemble of situations which at first glimpse is surprising due to the calculated nonchalance with which they are put together on the site.
             Not without some difficulty, we could enumerate these types of features that refer to his projects, but we would always have to do so using a negation: they lack hierarchies and are therefore horizontal designs. They do not use any type of articulations or conjunctions because they are systems of simple juxtaposition that do not form unbroken simultaneities, and there is no order among their components; they are almost illegible or they are not manifested in form.
             It is not hard to deduce from all of this that the concepts manufactured by Jean Nouvel to generate his architecture depend on a specific contingent state, a circumstance. Their constituent ideas respond to external parameters and thus refer at source to material, cultural, economic or social conditions chosen deliberately by the author to produce sufficient mutual tension. His aim is to generate an abstract machine that is sufficiently coherent from an intellectual perspective but not so much in the breadth of the specific territory it refers to. As Nouvel himself repeats insistently, the fuel can come from sources as diverse as military techniques, modern medical research, the financial limitation of the brief, or the significance of a colour in a certain culture. But a quick overview will show that the object is never regarded as a continuity of its context, although in certain projects he confesses that certain aspects are a replica of one of the specific conditions, as in the Head Offices of the Richmond Company. Far from it, his architecture is presented as a discontinuity of the context, a sudden emergence set in a time difference – an exception.
             In contrast to the majority of modern architec...