Jean Nouvel

Of the many sentences that could be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, the most important are those that highlight his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his defiance of accepted norms in order to push the boundaries of the field. For more than 30 years, Jean Nouvel has pushed the discourse and practice of architecture to new limits. His inquisitive and agile mind drives him to take risks in each of his projects, which, with greater or lesser success, have greatly expanded the vocabulary of contemporary architecture.

Since establishing his Paris studio in the 1970s, Nouvel has pushed himself, as well as those around him, to consider new approaches to conventional architectural problems. He is not interested in a unified approach or accepted typologies. He likes breaks in scale and form that move the viewer from one aesthetic sensibility to another. "I like the fact that one project can be ten thousand projects at the same time," says Nouvel.

The manipulation of light and layers of transparency and opacity are recurring themes in Nouvel's work. His Institut du Monde Arabe (Institute of the Arab World), built in Paris in 1987, was designed with adjustable metal lenses embedded in its south-facing glass façade to control the entry of light into the interior, a modern twist on the traditional Arab lattice. His Tour Sans Fins (Endless Tower) was selected as the winning entry in a 1989 competition to build a skyscraper in the La Defense area near Paris. The proposed 400-metre structure, which at the time was intended to be the tallest tower in Europe, but its height is not the most important thing, rather its skin, which changed materials as it moved upwards - from granite to aluminium, from stainless steel to glass - becoming increasingly diaphanous before disappearing into the sky. Here, as with the 2000 KKL Luzern (Cultural and Conference Centre) in Lucerne and the 1994 Fondation Cartier pour l'art Contemporain (Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art) in Paris, dematerialisation becomes tangible.

For Nouvel, there is no a priori "style" in architecture. Rather, context, interpreted in the broadest sense to include culture, location, programme and client, leads him to develop a different strategy for each project. The iconic Guthrie Theatre (2006) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, both blends into and contrasts with its surroundings. It responds to the city and the nearby Mississippi River, but it is also an expression of theatricality and magical show business.

In his recently completed Musée du Quai Branly (Quai Branly Museum) for the important collection of indigenous art from Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas in Paris, Nouvel designed a bold and unorthodox building with unusual spaces in which objects are displayed and understood in new ways. Many of the materials used in the interiors, including wall and ceiling decorations by native artists, allude to their countries of origin.

As a jury, we recognise that architecture is a field of many challenges and complexities and that an architect's career does not always follow a linear path. In the case of Jean Nouvel, we particularly admire the spirit of the journey - persistence, imagination, exuberance and, above all, an insatiable thirst for creative experimentation - qualities that abound in the work of the 2008 Pritzker Architecture Prize winner.