RETROSPECTIVE

A FTE R TH E E V E N T
The recent retrospective on Bernard Tschumi
at the Pompidou Centre provided a compelling
analysis of a career spanning over 45 years.
Departing from Corb’s Maison Domino as the
counterpoint to Tschumi’s Follies, a framework
of five conceptual strands traces the connections
from The Manhattan Transcripts to the Acropolis
Museum in Athens —and ultimately reveals the
architect’s unique integration of theory and practice
A N T H O N Y V ID L E R

AR | SEPTEMBER 2014 87
RETROSPECTIVE
In the summer of19871stood with Tschumi in front of
a completed Folly at La Villette, and asked whether he
thought that their red colour might have appealed to the
Socialist aspirations of Francois Mitterrand. He replied,
‘B ut red is not a colour.’I ’m not sure whether this was
the first time he had said this, but it was a first for me.
Venarey-les-Laumes in tlie Cote d’Or north of Dijon, is,
it must be said, a veritable ghost town: a former bustling
railway junction, its rows of railway houses are grey and
depressed; the major bar, aptly entitled Le Crdpuscule,
is for sale; its sole attraction a large regional supermarket.
Just beyond the town, however, there rises a small
mountain sacred to French historical mythology: the
reputed site where Vercingetorix, general of the assembled
Gauls, was defeated by Julius Caesar in 52 BC: ‘it is here
that France was born’, announces the guidebook. A climb
through the tiny village of Alise-Sainte-Reine brings the
visitor to a small excavation of the camp and the remains
of the small Gallo-Roman town built after the victory.
In 1895, at the completion of the excavations, Napoleon
III had a statue of himself, improbably dressed up as the
Gallic general, standing 7 meters tall on a base designed
by Viollet-le-Duc at the highest point of the mountain.
Two years ago, in a strange sign of new life, there rose
up from the flat plain on the site of Caesar’s camp, another
monument - an elegant cylindrical construction - its
upper storeys sheathed, like a palisade, in open-work slats
of wood. This structure, soon to be joined up on the hill
by its half-sunken stone-clad twin, forms the new
MuseoParc Alesia (AR June 2012) designed by Bernard
88 AR | SEPTEMBER 3014
1. (P re v io u s page)
a d e ta il fr o m T s c h u m i’s
M a n h a tta n T ran scrip ts,
tit le d ‘M u r d e r in th e P a r k '
in w h ic h a n a rr a tiv e
is tra n s c rib e d in to
g ra p h ic n o ta tio n
2 . M u s e o P a rc A le s ia
m a rk s th e s ite o f
V e r c in g e to rix ’s stan d
a g a in s t th e R om an s
and th e supposed
‘b irth o f Fra n c e '
3 . In s ta lla tio n v ie w o f
th e P om pid ou C e n tre ’s
Ts ch u m i re tro s p e c tiv e
Tschumi. Inside the completed Interpretation Centre,
aluminous circular atrium gives access to a gently sloping
ramp leading to the exhibition floor; there, an interior
exhibition provides a graphic vision of the Gallo-Roman
conflict, and outside a view of the broad plain, the sacred
mountain and a reconstruction of the Roman ramparts.
When complete, the two cylindrical buildings will
complement each other, a mile apart, two 21st-century
panoramas, the one of a contemporary ‘restored’ history,
the other of ancient historic remains.
R e tro s p e c tiv e
In the retrospective exhibition mounted in the South
Gallery of the Centre Pompidou, 30 April - 28 July this
year, the project of the MuseoParc was shown, together
with five other completed, commissioned or projected
projects dating from 2005 to 2014, in an open ‘pavilion’
of panels, under the rubric of OonceptForms. This group
of Tschumi’s most recent works constitutes the fifth in
a sequence of pavilions set in the gallery along an aleatory
route, that offers a more or less chronological expose of
Tschumi’s career from 1974 to the present, from, that is,
The Manhattan Transcripts to the recently completed
Zoological Park in Paris.
Each of the pavilions is, like the fifth, named, or rather
conceptualised: starting with Space and Event that
comprises the studies from The Manhattan Transcripts
to the Park of La Yillette, we are led to Program/
Juxtaposition/Superimposition that includes the series
of major competition submissions for the Tokyo National
Theatre, Osaka’s Kansai Airport, the French National
Library, and the completed National Studio for
Contemporary Arts at Le Fresnoy. The third pavilion,
Vectors and Envelopes collects the built projects of the
Z6niths at Rouen and Limoges, the Vacherin Constantin
offices and factory, and the ECAL School of Art and
Design, Lausanne together with a series of competitions
in the USA and Brazil. The fourth, Concept, Context,
Content, brings together a group of university buildings
- the Athletics Center for the University of Cincinnati,
the Lerner Center for Columbia University, the Schools
of Architecture for Mame-La-Vall6e and Florida
International University - with the Acropolis Museum,
Athens. Finally, Concept-Forms includes, besides
the MuseoParc and the Parisian Zoo Park, recent
competitions and studies for the Dubai Opera House,
a museum in Shenzhen, a cultural centre for Grottammare,
Italy, and the Carnal Hall for the Institut le Rosey, Rolle,
Switzerland now under construction.
A more or less complete roster of the most important
studies and buildings of Tschumi’s entire career to date,
then, under the rubric of what appears to be a theoretical
evolution or trajectory. This theoretical thrust is given
force throughout the exhibition by the constant
interrelation of Tschumi’s drawings and quasi-polemical
texts with models, renderings and photographs of
completed works. There is, it is implied, no separation
between theory and practice, concept and construct.
R e th in k in g
In the presentation of La Yillette, Tschumi admits that
his overriding question, having won the competition, and
after more than a decade of theorising and teaching, was:
‘Can practice follow theory?’ The division of theory from
design, and thence from practice, was of course embedded
in architectural thought, sustained by both by theorists
and their ‘practical’ opponents, and ingrained in the
course structure of architectural schools. It was a division
that was especially marked in the years of recession
around the 1970s, and exacerbated by a younger
generation of architects convinced that the reformist
wing of CIAM - gathered in Team X under the wings of
Peter and Alison Smithson —had failed to regenerate an
architecture that corresponded to the demands of a new
politic, an ever expanding and economically challenged
urban realm, and a newly technological world.
The alternatives were many. Banham’s call for an
‘architecture autre’ launching the ‘New Brutalisin’ in
1955, but transformed into a support for a technological
revolution spearheaded by Buckminster Fuller, had been
countered by those like Robert Yenturi who preferred
to work with the already established codes of historical
architecture, and the polemical diatribes of the AR in
favour of Gordon Cullen’s Townscape. By the 1970s, the
‘New’ Brutalism had evolved into a ‘New Monumentality’
in Mton brut, and the International Style heralded by
Hitchcock and Johnson, and practised by SOM, was no
more than a trickle-down version of its corporate self.
Under the leadership of Peter Eisenman at the Institute
for Architecture and Urban Studies, and Alvin Boyarsky
at the Architectural Association, the theoretical
exploration of more radical architectural possibilities
was fostered in design studios, symposia and publications.
First at the AA between 1971 and 1973, then at
the IAUS in 1976, Tschumi traced a path in writing and
teaching that set him apart from his colleagues. While
at the AA, Rem Koolhaas, Elia Zenghelis, with Madeleine
Yriesendorp and Zoe Zenghelis, explored the potential
power of post-Surrealist visual fiction; and at the Institute
Peter Eisenman and the ‘Whites’ developed a rigorous
formal method; and Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas
investigated the relationships between semiotic theory
and design, Tschumi posed a series of questions about
the nature of architecture itself.
Refusing nostalgic pleas for the continuation of one or
more of the multiple Modernist traditions —themselves
revealed to be equally historicist by the late 1970s - and
equally sceptical toward the utopian aspirations of ’68,
Tschumi built his case out of intellectual movements
that were neither ‘Modernist’ nor ‘Postmodernist’ but
that had emerged out of the political and disciplinary
conditions in France in the mid-’60s: Structuralism and
Post-Structuralism, and in particular the writings of
Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida through
to Denis Hollier and Georges Bataille. His reception of
these philosophers visA vis architecture differed radically
from the ‘semiology’ that all-too-easily adapted itself to
historicist quotation, and equally from the Foucauldian
discourse theory of institutional power, or the Rossian
structuralism that identified static typologies in city form.
Rather, Tschumi opted to identify categories of analysis
that at once denied the boundaries between ‘autonomous’
disciplines and that at the same time overcame any
superficial interdisciplinarity that had too often led
to analogical rather than internal reformulations.
The flux that he defined was the idea that architecture
was not primarily about objects and reified programmes
in themselves, or technological solutions overcoming
all others, but rather the complex interaction between
programme, action and event. Architecture in these terms
was neither autonomous, nor a supposed ‘language’,
to cite some of the alternative positions in play in the ’70s.
But in order to construe an architecture of programme/
action/event, Tschumi had first to confront two other
ruling themes present in theory from the 1920s: ‘space’,
the hero of Giedion’s apocalyptic ‘history’ of modern
AR I SEPTEMBER 2014 89
RETROSPECTIVE

‘Refusing nostalgic pleas for the more neutral and more open to absorption by reigning 4 . O n e o f th e 18 ‘r e fe r e n c e

ideologies and ways of life than idealists had supposed. ta b le s ' on sh ow a t th e

continuation of Modernist traditions, In the face of contemporary capitalist land speculation P o m p id o u r e tro s p e c tiv e ,

Tschumi built his case out of intellectual
movements that were neither Modernist
nor Postmodernist but that had emerged
the architect could (1) simply ‘translate’ existing political
and economic conditions into form; (2) work in the
critical and intellectual realm to reveal contradictions,
or (3) attempt to practise as a professional with expert
w h ic h c o lle c t fra g m e n ts
fr o m T s c h u m i’s arc h iv e
- th is one tit le d ‘c in e m a ’,
a m ed iu m w h ic h has
d e ep ly in flu e n c e d his w o rk

out of the political and disciplinary
conditions in France in the mid-’60s’
architecture, and gestalt psychology’s idea of Form.
Both had seen a revival in the 1960s and ’70s, and were
commonly prescribed antidotes to historicism, the former
by phenomenologists and empirical behaviourists, the
latter by the Formalist, later Collagist, criticism of Rowe.
Here the essay ‘The Environmental Trigger’ - prepared
for a symposium at the AA in 1972, but only published in
1975, after the gruelling battle to form a more ‘democratic’
constitution and Council against John (Michael) Lloyd the
Principal; and after the appointment of Alvin Boyarsky as
Chairman in 1971 - was pivotal.1Contributions included
Martin Pawley’s rollicking version of his schooldays in
architecture, and a more serious article stemming from
Emilio Ambasz’s 1972 Universitas conference; Cedric
Price’s terse statement of why he was an activist against
the merger with Imperial; an early version of Kenneth
Frampton’s signature ‘Labor, Work, and Architecture’;
interviews of prominent former AA grads with James
Gowan; a perceptive analysis by Peter Cook of successive
generations of AA students; and an account of the political
struggles for a ‘democratic’ constitution by Charles Jencks.
Of these, Pawley on the demilitarisation of the
university and Tschumi on the various strategies of
architecture and/or revolution were the most radical.
Following a bleak description of the existing conditions
for politics and architecture, Tschumi considered the
ways in which architects might attempt to generate social
transformation - and especially through the notion of
‘space’ recently demonstrated as political, first by the
revolutionary events of ’68 and then, more theoretically by
Lefebvre. Could space, asked Tschumi, be made a peaceful
instrument of social transformation, a means of
transforming the relationship between the individual and
society? Certainly the revolutionary tradition post 1917,
now being historically excavated by Anatole Kopp and
others, had advanced new spatial forms of living - the
minimal kitchen, the communal apartment, the linear city.
Post-’68, Tschumi’s generation was less optimistic -
the ‘behaviourist’ assumptions underlying these spatial
experiments had failed in their vision for structural
change, and the ‘social condensers’ hailed by admirers of
the Constructivist period in Russia had been defeated by
the resistance of ingrained social structures. ‘Most people
concerned with architecture feel some sort of disillusion
and dismay,’ Tschumi wrote in 1975. ‘None of the early
utopian ideals of the twentieth century has materialized,
none of its social aims has succeeded. Blurred by reality,
the ideals have turned into redevelopment nightmares
and the aims into bureaucratic policies.’2
Space, Tschumi concluded, was less tractable,
‘environmental knowledge’ to reform urban and
architectural structures. Combining the last two potential
activities, Tschumi identified two strategies: ‘exemplary
actions’ raising consciousness of urban conditions through
propaganda and demystification; and, ‘counterdesign’ -
ironic, like Archizoom and Superstudio. In the end
Tschumi proposed neither, developing in contrast a form
of analysis he named ‘subversive’, and gave the example
of the Situationists, but also the key acts of the radical
avant-garde in art, literature and film.3
The result is well-known: building on his perception
that, while grand transformations were unlikely to stem
from architectural interventions, a certain power inhered
in ‘incidents’, in ‘small actions’, he began to investigate the
potential of literary texts, and above all film, to contribute
strategies for the manipulation of space in relation to
what he now called ‘event’.
R e fe re n c e
The answer to Tschumi’s question on the relation of
theory to practice is at least partially delivered by the
present exhibition, for the layout of the exhibition as a
whole actively immerses us in a theoretical project of its
own. Scattered through the five pavilions are 18 so-called
‘Reference Tables’, square glass-topped vitrines containing
a host of fragments seemingly swept from the architect’s
table at various moments in his career, from family photos,
and formative sketches, through press-cuttings from 1968,
the little books published while teaching at the
Architectural Association, Princeton and the Cooper
Union, spatial diagrams, drafts of theoretical essays,
preparatory works for the ‘Advertisement for
Architecture’, analyses of screenplays, performance
notations, preliminary studies for the early conceptual
works, strategic games, to the roster of published books.
Spaced at apparently random intervals among the five
pavilions, these red-painted tables evoke nothing other
than the folies of La Villette, or rather, if we see the
pavilions as events, perhaps points in the implied grid
through which the movement of the visitor is guided
as if in notated dance. But with this difference from
the early grids of Joyce’s Garden or La Villette, Tschumi,
as he explains in the text accompanying the presentation
of the Paris Zoo, has embraced, together with
Concept-Form, the idea of a Concept-Informe, a scrambled
and somewhat ambiguous grid that allows for multiple
routes and choices of events.
We are thus presented with a mise en abyme: a
microcosm of a Tschumi park/city, reformulated according
to a carefully prescribed evolution from Space/Event
to Content/Form, that in itself includes all the evidence
for that evolution - a city within a city so to speak. Which
immediately leads to a problem of interpretation - how to
stand outside this immersive panorama that does what it

9 0 A R I S E P T E M B E R 2014
AR I SEPTEMBER 2014 91
RETROSPECTIVE

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92 AE | SEPTEMBER 2014
5 . T h e n a rr a tiv e s tru c tu re
of Finnegans Wake is
m ap p ed on to C o v en t
Write-on-Slides,
G a r d e n in
Joyce’s Carden ( 1 9 7 6 ) :
o n e o f T s c h u m i’s
e x p lo r a t io n s o f n a r r a t i v e
s t r u c t u r e in s p a c e
says and says what it does so clearly and insistently?
One way would be to disengage the strategy of the
exhibition - that of the five conceptual strategies - from
the chronology of the works themselves; to distinguish
between the strategies of the individual projects from
any assumed ‘evolution’ or ‘development’. In this regard,
you might discover that the Five Points of Tschumi’s
architecture were perhaps unequally distributed over
time, or better, from the outset incorporated in his initial
strategy only to be revealed in different modes according
to changing programmes; even as those celebrated
‘Five Compositions’ of Le Corbusier - that seemed to
rationalise after the event, five major commissions over a
period of a quarter century —could be seen in retrospect
to inhere into the first, omni-strategy, the Maison Domino.
And indeed, the Maison Domino, the degree zero of
Corbusian space, that led ultimately to the invention of
what he was to call Tespace indicible’ or ineffable space,
would be an appropriate starting-point for analysing
Tschumi. It is not by accident that the very first image
presented to the viewer in the exhibition, is precisely that
of this ur-paradigm of Modernist space, invented in 1914.
Against this - and it could be hazarded that Tschumi’s
entire oeuvre has been calibrated in the struggle to
overcome the Corbusian rhetoric of ‘the masterly, correct,
and magnificent play of volumes beneath the light’ —
Tschumi poses two alternative motors that together might
generate another kind of space: movement and action.
The apparently simple first move, that of elevating
movement in space constructed by events, over an idea
of space constructed by architecture for movement,
finally resulted in the emergence of the Folly as against
the Maison Domino, an elegant reversal or rather
readjustment of authority. Where the Domino House
was a carefully calibrated structure for the exercise of the
promenade architectural through a plan libre controlled
and scripted by the architecture of solids and voids,
the Folly itself is constructed through movement, and its
‘event’ quality construed as a kind of ‘knot’ in space that
at once enfolds this movement, and acts as a generator for
new events. The counter-Corbusian point is driven home
in the series of Advertisements for Architecture developed
between 1976 and 1978 where images of the deteriorating
fabric of the Villa Savoye are accompanied by texts that
celebrate its ‘state of decay’, not to deny its paradigmatic
status but rather to propose a beginning again, using
the counter-architectural metaphors of Bataille.
The invention of a new paradigm, however, involved
a long period of analysis and research, a period that is
given full attention in this exhibition, with studies of
the introduction into architecture - its ‘corruption’
so to speak as an autonomous discipline - of fields that
privileged the representation of movement: literary
narrative, film, and of course, dance and performance,
all of which had invented systems of notation that might
have architectural implications. Gradually, superimposing
the narrative structure of Finnegans Wake on the map
of Covent Garden (in the process superimposing Dublin
on London), and with the example of Eisenstein’s triple
notation of Alexander Nevsky (frame, music, montage),
Tschumi developed Screenplays that, taking one frame
‘Space, Tschumi concluded, was less
tractable, more neutral and more open
to absorption by reigning ideologies and
ways of life than idealists had supposed’
at a time, mapped its implied movement pattern, and
then translated this into a three-dimensional construct.
It is significant that the last of the Screenplays —that
included clips from the films Psycho, Frankenstein and
Citizen Kane, together with a notation taken from an
American football play - was no other than ‘Maison
Domino’; the direct application of the filmic movement
of fade-in and fade-out to a prime architectural space.
The trilogy event, space and movement was now
introduced into architecture, and The Manhattan
Transcripts (1978-81) served as an extended exploration
of the potential development of an architectural language
out of this mapped calibration of vertical simultaneity
and horizontal temporality. The display of all four parts
of the Transcripts, probably not seen together since 1981
at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York, grounds this
present exhibition in a double sense. Stretched out in
a single fine, on the red-painted entry wall of the room,
their continuities and disruptions are revealed, even
as their complexity anticipates the ‘unpacking’
undertaken by the rest of the show.
There is, first and foremost, the narrative that, in
four acts, traces a murder mystery in a prose, implying a
plot worthy of a Chandler or Elmore Leonard; a narrative
that is to accompany each of Tschumi’s projects, not
as an appendage or ex post facto authorisation, but
as the engendering structure of events that rewrite the
programmes with which he is presented. Then there is the
image that cuts the event out of the narrative - a photo or
film shot - that bears within it the potential of movement
in space. Finally there is the tracing of that movement
in space through notation, and projection in two and
three dimensions - plan and section, and axonometric.
The result is never a single, static spatial solution, but the
beginning of a process of investigation that nevertheless
retains echoes of the preceding operations. The narrative
informs movement, movement notation eventually informs
physical elements, while three-dimensional ‘pantographic’
translations inform the spatial construct achieved.
In the end nothing is given up, while nothing remains
exactly the same. Thus in the Parc de la Villette, the point
grid of the follies stems from the grid adopted from the
intersecting lines of the map of Covent Garden in Joyce’s
Garden, which themselves echo the cruciform towers
that stand as information centres in the plan of Cedric
Price’s Fun Palace. These are merged with the idea of the
20th-Century Follies projected and partially constructed
between 1979 and 1982; the follies as events then serve as
markers for the aleatory paths, that as extended ribbons
of filmic notation put the park into movement.
It would not be difficult, in these terms, to return each
of the Five Concepts to their ‘origin’ in the Transcripts,
even as we can trace the ebb and flow of different
strategies over the next 45 years of work. Thus the
ARI SEPTEMBER 2014 93
RETROSPECTIVE
567 574 581
v r /
Superimposition of the grid on the Park, the Follies
on the Grid, and the Movement paths on this, anticipate
other superimpositions, such as the inhabited roofscape
of Le Fresnoy. Equally, the La Villette grid partakes of
the nature of a Concept-Form, while programme, concept,
context and contents are ever-present. Perhaps the
only theme absent from the Transcripts is that of the
‘envelope’, that inevitable intrusion of an architectural
surface into the programmatic demands of mass
entertainment and production. In this way avoiding
the trap of behaviourist functionalism, and evading the
internal ‘autonomies’ of traditional architectural theory,
Tschumi moves from map (Joyce’s Garden) to story-board
{Screenplays, Manhattan Transcripts) transforming
architecture’s use of maps and story-boards along the way.
All five conceptual strategies come together in the
Acropolis Museum. Set below the mountain itself, but
with a full view of the side of the Parthenon, the Museum
is poised above the excavated archaeological remains
revealed by construction. As if in ‘superimposition’, the
glass viewing box for the frieze and associated fragments
is placed over the museum proper, and this above the
entry level, which in turn hovers over the underground
9 4 A R I S E P T E M B E R 2014
588 , 595 602 609 616
,k. Iv -
r
i
\A k \ I Vi
that was once the ground of the Greek civilisation. 6 . O n e o f Tsch u m i's
The envelope of glass at once wraps a space that allows n o ta tio n s re la tin g to
full rein to the Parthenon processional, as if magically a 1 9 9 2 fir e w o r k display
a t P a rc de la V ille t te ,
transported from the hill above, and displaces any
‘a th re e -d im e n s io n a l and
‘architecture’ that might obstruct the connection between fle e tin g v e rs io n o f th e
the original monument and its former sculptures. o rg a n is a tio n a l p rin c ip le
The route taken by visitors to the Acropolis, along the o f th e p a rk : nam ely,
path traced by the mosaic of fragments composed by th e s u p e rim p o s itio n
Dimitris Pikionis, is referred to in the path of visitors o f sy stem s o f po ints,
lin es, and s u rfa c e s '
who first enter the museum from a plaza with their backs
7. T s ch u m i's A c ro p o lis
turned to the hill, before moving in a spiral finally to view M u s e u m s u p erim p o ses
the Parthenon at the same moment as its frieze. Space an a le a to ry ro u te on th e
and event are conjugated by the erratic grid of columns ru in s o f G re e k c iv ilis a tio n ,
supporting the structure, in a pattern forced by the b rin g in g to g e th e r his
uncovered ruins, columns that double for the statues that in te re s ts in n a rra tiv e ,
m o v e m e n t and gam es
are scattered among them, as if set between the trees of
the Academy garden for Plato’s students to contemplate.
Beneath this apparent ease with which conceptual
categories are used to articulate the final structure and
B e r n a r d Ts ch u m i
elements of a single building, is a second strategy that
A rc h ite c tu re :
provides the logic of the design process itself, and ensures C o n c e p t a n d N o ta tio n ,
its flexibility. This is the dialectical play of what, in an P o m p id o u C e n tre , P a ris ,
almost literal analogy, sees the site, urban or 3 0 A p r i l - 2 8 J u ly
 7
R e fe re n ce s
1. Bernard Tschumi,
‘The Environmental
Trigger’, in James Gowan,
ed, A Continuing
Experiment Learning
and Teaching at the
Architectural Association
(London: Architectural
Press, 1975), pp89-100.
2. Bernard Tschumi,
‘Questions of Space:
The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth (or the
Architectural Paradox)’,
Studio International
(Sept-Oct 1975),
reprinted in Architecture
and Disjunction
(Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1974), p27).
3. Bernard Tschumi,
‘The Environmental
Trigger’, pp93-99.
4. Bernard Tschumi,
Architecture: Concept
and Notation, exhibition
catalogue, Frtidftric
Migayrou, ed (Paris: ''•iiniiffl

Editions du Centre
Pompidou, 2014), pl83.

architectural, as a game board. It is impossible to see
the crosses on the grid of Joyce’s Garden, the grids of
Manhattan Transcripts, and those of the projects for La
Villette, without imagining a complex game being played.
Not a game that, as traditionally conceived, articulates
architectural elements or assembles them into a more or
less unified parti, but a kind of elaborate chess with rules
that seem to be reformulated at every instant, a game
of strategy, like that played on his own game board, the
kriegspiel of Guy Debord. In an earlier article I compared
this game to that encountered by Alice in Through the
Looking Glass, but now I would set this game in the long
history of urban games that attempt to construe new and
different futures for the environment - from Plato to
Buckminster Fuller. Tschumi’s version is elaborated in
an actual game kit provided for the client of a business
park at Chartres in France, where as Tschumi notes,
he proposed ‘several abstract systems, including a grid
defined by trees and a linear vector superimposed on
the grid at an angle. The linear vector, or “long-cours,”
contains cultural and commercial activities; the grid
contains the office buildings. Other systems address public
spaces, road networks, and infrastructure. Each system
becomes part of a master-planning game that allows
maximum flexibility and multiple combinations.
The master plan represents a way to work that has to
do with strategy rather than form. The competition model
is a game-board with fixed and mobile pieces housed in
an extra-thin case.’4
The exhibition as a whole demonstrates a ‘consistency’
in Tschumi’s work from the beginning to the present, as
well as a conceptual ‘development’ that continually circles
back to remember former exercises and projects. But
this consistency does not rely on a forced unity of theory,
nor on a self-conscious adoption of change and evolution.
For while the analytical approach is ever-present in words,
sketches, diagrams, programmatic research, that endow a
strategic clarity to the resulting architectural construct, it
is continually refreshed by encountering new programmes
and environmental conditions. For in the end, what this
exhibition reveals, and for the first time comprehensively,
as we trace and retrace our notated dance through
concepts and forms, is that, for Tschumi at least, there
is no theory without practice, nor practice without theory.
In fact it would be invidious to try to separate the two,
and even better to jettison the categories altogether.

AR ISEPTEMBER 2014 95
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96 AR I SEPTEMBER 2014
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