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Design and new societies

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Plan for a transportation hub in Lausanne, Interface Flon -- image courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects

A collage of four aspects of the new city, from Bernard Tschumi's conceptual investigation of the function of a replacement for the World Trade Center towers -- images courtesy of Bernard Tschumi Architects

I do not believe it is possible, nor that it makes sense, to design buildings that formally attempt to blur traditional structures, i.e., which display forms that lie somewhere between abstraction and figuration, or somewhere between structure and ornament, or that are cut-up, dislocated for aesthetic reasons. Architecture is not an illustrative art; it does not illustrate theories (I do not believe you can design deconstruction . . .). You cannot design a new definition of the city and its architecture. But you may be able to design the conditions that will make it possible for this non-hierarchical, non-traditional society to happen. By understanding the nature of our contemporary circumstances and the media processes that go with it, architects are in a position to construct conditions that will create a new city and new relationships between spaces and events.

Architecture is not about the conditions of design, but about the design of conditions that will dislocate the most traditional and regressive aspects of our society and simultaneously reorganize these elements in the most liberating way, where our experience becomes the experience of events organized and strategized through architecture. Strategy is a key word in architecture today. No more masterplans, no more locating in a fixed place, but a new heterotopia. This is what our cities must strive towards and what we architects must help them to achieve by intensifying the rich collision of events and spaces. Tokyo and New York only appear chaotic. Instead, they mark the appearance of a new urban structure, a new urbanity. Their confrontations and combinations of elements may provide us with the event, the shock, that I hope will make the architecture of our cities a turning point in culture and society.

Tschumi 1994, 259-60

  • [Nearby: Methods: let it be -- A deconstructive superego ? ]