Jean-Christophe Quinton

Every architect develops a unique culture, the product of the tension between a general culture shared by all architects and a project culture specific to each.
The project culture’s most important effect is to liberate the architect from set expressions, from stereotypical and conventional thought, and thereby open the way for a personal approach to design.The project culture shapes this approach, provides a bulwark against preconceptions, against modish influences, and allows the architect to develop his or her conceptual independence and a personal set of tools.
In order to develop my approach, I had to distance myself from the preoccupations of rhetorical demonstration and move towards those of manifestation. In the moment of conception, I step back from the need to produce symbolic, political or social signs, the things that distance people from architecture. I prefer to focus on built signs, phenomena and the presence of things.
From this perspective, three convictions dictate the way projects
develop. The first conviction is that there is a way of renewing our discipline by exploring architecture’s inherent resources.These resources raise the question of the relationship between bodies, between the human body and the architectural body, between these bodies and the environment, their use, their materials. The second conviction is that the architectural space must first and foremost be a place of immediate, concrete and sensorial experience, neither discursive nor semantic. The third conviction concerns a mode of conceptual action: the goal is to produce a simple figure, optimized and circumstantial, which relieves the complexity of the project’s initial situation.This figure, often strange, should generate an instantaneous experience of architecture.