Bernard Tschumi will open the Osservatorio sull’Architettura’s series of events for 2005. The program is sponsored by the Fondazione Targetti with a grant from the Assessorato all’Urbanistica (Town Planning Commission) of the City of Florence.

 

A leader in international avant-garde architecture, Bernard Tschumi is a stable point of reference with his theories and completed projects. From the early radical works of his youth to his international recognition with the creation of the Parc de la Villette in Paris in the late nineteen eighties, from the Rouen projects to recent designs for enlarging Columbia University in New York and the University Campus in Miami, to the most recent international competitions he has won, for the new Acropolis museum in Athens, the Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo, and the Museum of African Art in New York, he has always proved himself to be one of the most innovative figures in contemporary architecture.

 

The meeting-event, organized by Pino Brugellis and Giovanni Damiani will be an interview, with young critics questioning Tschumi. By covering the most significant milestones in the Swiss master’s career, it will present an overview of the complexities that have characterized architecture from the nineteen-sixties to the present, from his participation in student protests to his joining with the deconstructionists, from his opposition to the concept of architecture as an autonomous discipline to the “surrealist-realism” of an architecture that seeks a method for reaffirming new ways of existing in the complex world of the social contradictions in the metropolis.

 

Tschumi has chosen urban space as the theme for defending his theoretical development. It is not metaphysical space where to create shapes that can evoke memories, but rather a place of experience: a space with all its violence, the violence of reality. Violence in architecture is inevitable since architecture is as inexorably linked to events like order is linked to chaos. This suggests that actions qualify space as much as space qualifies actions.

“Whose responsibility is it to conceive and direct these exquisite spatial pleasures, these uncomfortable architectural tortures, these twisting paths, these promenades through frenzied passageways and these theatrical events in which the actor completes the sets?” This is the issue for Tschumi for whom violence is inherent in architecture and in managing space. There is no room for innocence: anyone who does architecture and wants to design space is forced to exercise violence, first on the space itself and then on those who use it.

What interests Tschumi is the space generated by the motions and lives of those who traverse it. The subjects of his architecture are the persons who live with it and the spatial relationships that join them. It is the experience of moving around in the metropolis that creates the space and the relationships between things and people. Architecture is generated by social relations, by motions and by the spatial involvement of those who create it.

 

After the collapse of the ideals of building a better world, Tschumi is interested in the world the way it is. It is a world that abandons all stylistic refinement to become the home of the harshest reality. That world, “without quality”, without vision represents the metropolis’s loss of values: a perverse nudity that offers no way out. However, in this valueless society, Tschumi believes that it is once again possible to design: into his works he puts all the energy that is imprisoned by the urban experience and creates his own considerations on dynamism and events.

 

Tschumi, however, also represents surrealism’s ascent to power. It is no longer possible to distinguish between the normal and the abnormal, between the whole and the disconnected. Therefore, architecture’s new territory becomes the space of negotiations, of uncertainty. The places get mixed up like the mechanisms and rules comprising the new society which has already exploded and understood that the revolts of the ‘Sixties were nothing more than an attempt to redefine the new power structure.

It was a short circuit that brought the “protesting” generation to dominate the market. While the post-modernist currents proposed a surrender to the progressive crumbling of society and “High Culture,” a prevalently English-speaking generation, which French-Swiss Tschumi frequented at the AA (Architectural Association School of Architecture) in London and then in the United States –accepted the impossibility of stemming the long nihilistic wave, and instead used it as the starting point to try to construct new social standards and rules. And over the past twenty years these rules have become the basis for the global economy and culture and have contributed to creating a new ruling class. It is an approach that has served to transform the wild energy of events to construct a new reality.

It is in this climate that architects such as Tschumi have been able to enjoy the light of the dawn of a new season, and it is in the same climate that it is “normal” that a book by Tschumi, presented in the form of photocopies, winks at the freedom of use and circulation, and “normal” that it become an expensive and highly sold book published by a company such as the MIT Press. It is also “normal” that Tschumi, who in his preface to the book takes the issue of social transformation to its most extreme consequences, served as Dean of one of the greatest American schools – Columbia University in New York – for over twenty years. It is normal that pop-culture has become the culture of our times. It is this “normality” that we will discuss, because it is the challenge of our day.

 

The meeting-event will also be the occasion for presenting Architecture and Disjunction, a best seller Tschumi wrote in 1996 and which has become a classic of architectural literature.