Bernard Tschumi - Conceptualising Content

and it's a great great pleasure to to welcome back to the a a bernard tschumi who is joining us mid-flight between Athens and and London and who in the middle of a very busy schedule has found a couple of hours available to come join us back at Bedford Square his his legacy is one of the really influential teachers thinkers architects of this place in recent decades is is one that many of you will all know very well not just in the direct form which Bernards legacy exists in through the work of diploma 10 that still goes on within the Diploma school here at the AAA and the work of Carlos who's worked with Robert mol Nigel Coates and many others since Bernard launches the unit in in the 1970s but in many many other forms in terms of its preoccupations interests and aims and particularly his experimentation with things like group work in a studio setting which in the 1970s got many people's attention in a generation later became a topic that many of us went back and revisited and of course also that units work on not just a concept like program or event space which has many interesting legacies within the school today but also it's experimentation it's active experimentation with print medium and graphic space as an extension of architectural space which to this day and in fact given the events last Saturday in the symposium on a legacy of 60s and 70s magazines which came out of this place is still something that that many people are working on today Bernard was someone who brought those kind of topics with incredible intellectual rigor to this place in 1973 with the launch of a unit that overtly took those as topics of work for the students and teachers within that unit Bernard of course after setting up the unit and working here for several years in Knight in the 1980s ends up in New York and very soon after the publication of Manhattan transcripts in 1981 winds what looking back is really one of the defining architectural competitions of an era la Villette parc la Villette in 1982 which in an interesting life afterwards opened up a space of program driven thinking large surface organization projects which at the time was an incredible anomaly in architectural culture but which of course predates and anticipates an incredible discourse not very many years later that runs throughout the 1990s and looks at surface projects and large-scale infrastructure as a part of architectural discourse and architectural culture in the 1980s he begins working actively as an architect in New York becomes the Dean of the Graduate School of Architecture planning and preservation at Columbia University which he directs from 1987 to 2003 sets the absolute international standard of what if school of architecture can be in the closing years of the 20th century and creates a legacy that all of us now need to think through as we take schools forward in the beginning of the 21st century his publications I've already mentioned Manhattan transcripts in 1981 which like the project for la Villette is an incredible anticipation of another branch of architectural culture more recently particularly the discourse of the diagram the famous notations and diagrams that are made in that book become a foundational moment in a young generation shift towards notation itself is a topic of architectural thinking after Manhattan transcripts a number of books the most the most well-known certainly being a series of three known as events cities the final one of which is published volume three in 2005 titled concept versus context versus content which strikes quite close I think to the title of tonight's lecture conceptualizing context please join me in welcoming bernard tschumi hey Thank You Brett that's very nice it's very nice to be here to rather have a party than give a talk you realize what I've been in London a number of times in the last whatever 15 years or 20 years the last time I was in this building was at the time of Alvin Boyarsky so that's a while ago so obviously it's great to be here and it's a pleasure to find this in a lecture on practically unchanged night as it is and to find some of my best friends practically unchanged you know larger codes here coming from here among others right and so this is quite wonderful so where does one start you know especially after your instruction after the the exhibition which is next door and by the way this exhibition is rather unusual imagine any of you in this room suddenly finding on the wall everything that you saw you know 20 or 25 years ago before you were born sort of it's exactly before I was born in a sense that these magazines were creating a climate for conversations which is as you might have seen throughout this weekend quite different from architecture today in other words today there is such an enormous need for immediate production production of everything in particular images that occasionally what architecture is best at may be forgotten namely that architecture is a as I've often said is not about knowledge of form but really about a form of knowledge and it's saying soon architecture that we can learn a number of things about the world we live in what we do just as much as a mathematician or little very critics or a movie maker can think about the world we live in through his or her craft so namely I would say that anything that I do as an architect is not about the production of images but rather about the production of knowledge in other words trying to find out what we're doing considering that architecture is still an extremely young art one that has a long long way to go it's probably one of the rare disciplines that constantly redefine itself I do not think that architecture is that much to do today with what it had 200 years ago and yet it shares a few sort of artifacts a few rules but the rest of it is in constant flux so the question is really about questions so what I would like to show you tonight is a little bit some of the question that came out of the work you know in the past few years also score concept content context sort of game on words but really it starts this particular set of question that I want to discuss with you tonight starts with a particular project which we which happened now if you can turn the light off which really began exactly six years ago interesting moment when we wanted competition and I heard about the competition a few about an hour before the events of 9/11 it's a competition that we never celebrated there for and yet the whole building is a celebration of sorts if architecture is a form of knowledge what do you do as an architect when you have to build a building 300 meters from that building at the top right that's the first challenge the second challenge is what you do when your site is this and you're not allowed to build on it that's the second challenge and what do you do when your third challenge is a little bit of the road and you really want to take it away from it and people say if your building is good enough they'll give it back of course you've recognized the Elgin marbles at the British Museum so question but of course it doesn't quite come out of the blue when you do a project of this sort you may act completely intuitively or simply a very in my particular case fairly analytically I tend to look at what are the constraints I work around those constraints and generally come to a solution which takes advantage of those constraints but what happened with this particular one and I'm not going to show you the project yet is that for a long time I will not show it to anyone because it did not quite fit in any of the work that had been done before you know take for example well maybe I'll go back first of that you know you were talking about the 70s Brett let me show you what the battles were about the 70s and you know you had on one hand those people who hated that and said no no this is absolutely horrendous right and they had suggestions and they were suggesting we should build this right and a that was called reinvented at the time for this type of word they invented the word contextual right it's not the way I used the word context and then they said architecture has to be for the people it has to be popular so they went one step further and not very far from that they built live why do I bring these three things is that that was long before quote quote the constructivism which didn't make much sense in any case but that's not tonight's topic in other words they were simply ways to do things which had nothing to do with way it was and the circumstances in which it was built they were simply icons they were simply images when in reality very quickly when you find yourself an architect you find generally yourself at the center of what I would call the bags and nuts one particular reason why I think architects have so much power and they don't realize it is that most of the time the politicians the commercial people the HVAC engineers never have an overview never have a general sense of what you do with the big picture we do and look I look at first the Parc de la Vida that was the site and what always strikes me is struck me is for years we said it was a project made tabula rasa in other words a concept and that concept was really what counted but in reality they were a lot of things that were on that site and when I started to say hey how's about developing a concept which would really be the reversal as the continuity of the city the continuity here is matched by the discontinuity of the point grid in reality what was happening that point grid that appeared entire the abstract that appeared entirely neutral but perfect tabula rasa was very carefully matched in terms of the scale and in terms of the dimension between each of the parts with all the constraints of that side canal very large building and Museum of Science and Industry of 19th century Market halls and so on so in other words we were talking about something that gave the appearance of an entirely abstract system point lines and surfaces lines of vectors of movements points are points of intensity activities and so on and here the freedom of random activities you know in the fields in the latest surfaces but strangely enough it adjusted itself in a very precise manner around each of those constraints and you could ask yourself whether somehow that particular concept was not also born out of that series of constraints and of course then an image the develops you have 20th century you know culture 19th century culture and the new buildings themselves that engage in a dialogue they are not in isolation they are there in order to play that dialogue and little by little parts like the canal and so on start to make a play a role and the architecture is not about being contextual but again about playing with and against the concept context in other words it was maybe conceptualizing a not sorry comes and get royally wrong every time you know with this game of words it was about contextualizing a concept the concept thing lafrana wa a few years later the second building we did twist again an interesting situation a building that exists which is supposedly not supposably which had we received its definition permit and which had some interesting dimensions but not that much had an incredible roof however a sort of landscape which housed the most amazing spaces which I could this you know say you had 15 feet or 15 meter spaces when your budget could only allow you to have you know three or four meters so the idea of simply taking these buildings as it is putting a large roof what I would describe as an electronic roof over it in other it was the program by the way very briefly for those who don't know the project is was called an electronic bajas the idea was to have a combination of crossover artists in other words artists to practise multimedia TV cinema dance performance art sculpture and all that under the same roof you know I sort of named June Paik push to the extreme but with the same ambitions the same an educational ambition as the Bauhaus so I said well instead of tearing this building down keep everything it'll be multimedia it'll be a crossover building to such an extent that the new roof would hover over the existing town the little town of took one year Lille and that in a sense it was not about merging it was not about being contextual it was being about at you know a sort of form of dialogue because after all architecture to me is always about cities and cities are about the interaction and dialogues and and between the the to the old building and the new building an interstitial space an in-between namely a place of taking over of appropriation that artists could use for their own purposes for the exhibition for their film and whatever in other words a set of walkways and galleries and catwalks that would allow people to take it over to appropriate space and in here the old spaces being now revitalized with a library bookstore and always sort of thing and performance spaces museum spaces cinemas restaurant and all that with a space which is a quite an extraordinary space which is not about really composing designing it's not design it's simply the logic of the argument it's simply the strategy of putting a concept together the meeting of the umbrella and the sewing machine on the dissecting table you all known those words of Lord Rama it quoted by the surrealist that's a little bit one part of the architecture of this building in other words you take advantage of the circumstances and you turn it as a piece of architecture the interesting thing about this it avoids falling into the formal cliche of an era in other words you do not have quite you cannot apply something you have to start a little bit from scratch now this same thing can now increase in scale let me show you a scale switch you're familiar in particular in this room with what is happening in some parts of China in this big case a picture being taken about four years ago this of course does not exist anymore as it has been demolished and replaced by those 25 stories towers spaced out by eight lane highways with amazing amount of pollutions and that's of course is not necessarily the city of tomorrow the public life which take place in the hood on the two-story buildings the the interaction takes place as simply gone a there is at the in between the the fourth and the fifth ring set of factories which were taken over by a number of artists about 15 years ago and were turned into extraordinary art spaces galleries people living there and so on and it was due to be demolished to be replaced by those 25-story housing towers the intention was indeed to put a 1 million square meters 10 million square feet of housing on that location so once again concept context content amusingly enough perhaps for someone of my generation to say that one has building floating above others is not that crazy I remember someone called Jana Freedman trying things that they sought in the 1960s but amusingly enough with Freedman the density that he was proposing was lower on the ground was lower on the sky in the sky then on the ground which in a case like the ones that occupy us today in our contemporary cities has to be exactly the other way around higher density above low density on the ground and that was exactly what this was was all about so we took each of those buildings the existing situation looked at them and saw that in between we had a room to put supports large shafts for elevators escalators duck fire exits instruction so that one could have above it hovering as so to speak not unlike the case of Allah for Anwar where you have the hovering roof over everything a hovering city of 1 million square meters above the existing buildings the proposal of at at factory 7 side 8 was such that an enormous amount of publicity ensued and for about two years the thing was in limbo construction the demolition was stopped and eventually the neighbourhood is saved this is not built but in many ways it is considered that our project because of the enormous media attention that it received helps preserving the the the cultural area in other words through a project we may have acted we lost a commission but why not in a room where Cedric price used to live you remember his anecdote about a I always will tell you matter what you all know it but I'll tell it again he speaks with two clients for two months trying to find out what they views about their house they want to inhabit and the end of the two months he tells them it's not a house you want it's a divorce and two did indeed divorce that's also the role of the architect tabula rasa never exist look let's go to mega scale this is the Caribbean this is an island called the Republican the Dominican Republic and one day we got we get the commission of a lifetime Wow look nothing and do you know what the program is a city of 40,000 inhabitants now any of you architects you get really excited tabula rasa 40,000 inhabitants that's what she'll immediately think about right ha here is Niemeyer Here I am but of course nothing again is so simple today there's always something this is something in other words in an island which is quite interesting for the fact that 52 percent of the territory is nationally protected it's like a National Forest even though this area the area of the site was entirely free to do anything we wanted with we could have torn everything down we felt hey maybe there was a concept that could be developed that concept by the way the program what is driving this particular project is money of course looking at the Dominican Republic as a hub a financial hub like the Virgin Islands or many of those the Cayman Islands a hub between Latin America and North America for exchange centers a free trade zone for each service room as they called today the site the site six kilometers times four kilometers this is the tip of the island of Manhattan so you do tear everything down not quite what we started to do was to look at that planting although you did the sort of low brush low forests to every trees about what 15 feet 5 meters high and we started to say let's start to carve a series of clearings and in these clearings the clearings would be the beginning of that master plan in other words elliptical openings arranged playing with certain characteristic of the site today's a topography the topography and its site and its contours give us certain hints about the infrastructure the road network and little by little we developed what I would describe as a chessboard episode on which once you design the chessboard all you need to do is to add the pieces and the rules how you play with it and of course you know business centre school housing shopping and so on is a series of specialized Island not unlike something which has been enormously vilified which is the bubble diagrams of the 50s which by the way is a great invention which has been certainly not taken care of and I encourage everyone of you to revisit the bubble diagram so here is each of our Islands Islands within the ground in other words the clearings and the acting like boundaries in other words it can be either built or planted or fence depending on the activities that take place and the master plan itself phased over a period of 25 years if the business centre itself in this is only a small part of the overall project that's here the the business centre and some the areas this is the first phase infrastructure has just started with a tells and things of this sort so in other words a concept begins once again with the understanding of what is happening around and when I use the word context please don't misunderstand me it as thing to do with visual thing it doesn't have anything to do with what it looks like it's all about the social the political and if you want even the everyday dimension of what happens there but of course you're going to ask me haha look you've shown us interesting project but who very often that's what we get that's not much of a place right I guess you wouldn't even know whether it's in outside London our outside Chicago outside Berlin it's all the same so hence here one get back to some more architectural issues and lets you ask yourself what do you do when you receive the request to put six thousand people in one single building it's a large concert hall and these 6,000 people have among other things to get out of the building in 90 seconds so the envelope of the building becomes immediately one of the more important issues and the the other one is how to move through that building and vectors in other words the vectors of movement activate what happens in the building while the envelope itself becomes its definition and here is an image of almost like an x-ray of the outside a envelope that keeps the rain out before the cladding over it and the inner envelope with the the supporting the seeds in other words two very different system they have nothing to do with one another if you want the concrete shell is totally independent from the outer steel envelope interestingly enough I always find fascinating to see how the the declining starts to take an architectural role and it's not an accident that it happens I love repeating that sentence that architecture is the materialization of an idea that is lameta realization of a concept and whenever you do any type of dream a bubble that bug Lobby sort of exploration at the end you have to keep the water at and it's just quite a part of the exciting moment when the concept is itself reinforced by the way you build it in other words architecture is the materialization of a concept here the steel Dale Lane becomes the first expression with inside the concrete and the the movement vectors in other words very simple thing very few materials just concrete and steel a little bit of glass and that's enough to tell the story there's absolutely no reason to go over it it is about a concept it's not about a form it's not about a decoration it is about a concept hence why should you use more than the materials you need to express a concept in the concrete and the steel and when you walk in immediately it comes alive because and maybe one may remember things which one talked about at ba and many many years ago which is that there is no space without that something that happens in it and it's at that moment that architecture begins and even if you use material like the transparency of the the concrete floor so that the concrete is really the most important thing it's at the moment when people walk in that it becomes alive in other words that at that moment that it becomes architecture before that it's not much so some images again the steel the concrete okay now that was the site what happens when you get exactly the same program six thousand people but you have to put them here and get them in 90 seconds again same program but a quite different set of circumstances so sure you can do the same building not quite and yet the concept works so well everybody's very happy with your concept everybody is extremely happy with the use of the building in other words the content so here we started to look at it and said hey maybe in that forest that 200 year old forest and maybe we can start to explore with other materials the materialization of the concept can take different kind of expressions and here in the two-hundred-year-old forest we started of course to play with wood which there was plenty of an industry in that particular part of France in the center of France so we said let's Lu you look then but let's also play with the light and say that a vaild sheet material polycarbonate could be turned into a major construction material so pieces of polycarbonate that are each 40 feet long 30:12 mini a little over 12 meter long it will assemble over this a series of ribs the building then become a material it's not only the polycarbonate very recent material against the word vey ancient material but it's also the material of light and at night it becomes like a magic lantern of course the movement vectors you recognize them here when you have to move those six thousand people around you tend to take you know Rams going down or going up to take them to their seats and then the building becomes something and special because the lighting start to play a role as it is reflected through the building at night or you know transmitted in during the day that's the view where the light is diffused in unusual manner by material that we only are starting to discover some of its properties so namely it's the same concept the same content but entirely different of course you recognize certain plants the circulations are still all of concrete but the light and the feel and the acoustic and everything in this building is like a different building so that has interested me that there is no cause a effect relationship no cause and effect between what health you know between a concept between a content and what it becomes at the end let's view that's not a model that's taken from the catwalks at the top looking down at the wood seeds and the building as it is so at the time of Elections you know there's not only a rock concert you have in these things there's also political meetings and so on left the building in war rightly been doing in the marsh concept and content so this taking advantage of constraints is one of the thing that fascinates me it's not the beginning you don't start with constraints and you're going to get a project because of that but they force you not to fall into the catalogue of received ideas look in this particular case that's a in Cincinnati University of Cincinnati a large stadium a basketball arena for 15,000 people 35,000 here the number sports ground and the client says you know Bernard we need this big big office building for the coaches of those thing you know America is a big sports country universities in the Midwest thrive through sports and a they in Cincinnati we need we offices for the coaches of basketball baseball football golf tennis and what have you male females and so on so it's hundreds of people we need training grounds training rooms rather weights you know weightlifting and pools and so on that's the program so of course the university had made certain studies and he found it not today easy to locate that building because as they told me but now you can put the building anywhere you want provided you put everything back so we looked and to put this back or that if we were putting there was this place but I'm not I'm not very mature facade architect I just in like the idea of being here and while here right at the center that's the center of activity is you have a currently a building by a domain the recreation center which was built here and this was I felt was the most desirable place so but the problem is when I said to the the university look you know I'd like to put it right here they said Brunel you can't because you have a big power station right underneath here and you have loading docks getting into this building so we said okay let's look at what we can do if I make a huge trust out of the facade so as if it was a bridge so that I can span the 30 meters here and even further back even longer span here to protect the depth power station and to be able to get my trucks here without having any support that I can do if I make the building as a bridge so as I said I don't like to design facade for the sake of it so it was easy to say well haha I wonder I'll get a little further the building itself becomes like a bridge itself the facade is designed through the actual concept the concept becomes materialized and then indeed in this particular case quite interesting development can take place in the US and most places now in the world you're not allowed two weeks have exposed structures anymore so the structure if you have this type of geometry to do it out of concrete is extremely complex to clad it in steel also so we reverse the equation the the structure is in fear but the protection is made of a extremely large pieces of a precast concrete which have each a particular geometry which of course allow a certain design strategies with computers which could not have been done as you all know in this room wouldn't have been done 15 or 20 years ago so the again it starts with an analysis of a situation it never starts with a phone and the the atrium which is also combined with a museum sort of sports museum amusingly enough I was only too fascinated by the idea the set narrative sequence and the old Manhattan transcript and suggested that we put all the sports images along the catwalks although the walkways of the atrium so that this type of continuous narrative would become one of the themes of the building itself I mentioned that you're going to see in a few minutes why are the buildings that are not going to show tonight proceed also from that analysis of a program in other words a Content the the building in for a watch Factory in Geneva whereby you have the so-called blue-collar workers and then the the white-collar worker all under one single as envelope and simply is the folding of the hope that allows us to have one general common denominator for everybody in the building or in this particular case the the constraints of the 5th Avenue where the architects are all required to put everything within a box that coincide with the boxes of all those buildings today you cannot do the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue anymore you have to make a box right so we said okay fine we'll do your glass box and inside we'll do whatever we want so or here again the the the work of the on the double envelope you know I say hello to answer the broker if we would sort of want this project and only next one played an important role where the double envelope is crucial where the inner envelope is made of steel and wood the outer envelope is made of glass and with in-between the movement vectors the circulation where the program itself is entirely visible through it or in Sao Paulo the Museum of Modern Art where this time to mention the Guggenheim again it's not a building that is introvert the ramp itself is a way to look at the city in other words the building is about the city and the art is only inside but I won't talk about these buildings tonight now let me get to the the last three projects New York amazing city as you all know but for some strange reason is it the so called zoning laws that means that practically all the buildings when they go up tempt to go in steps it's now in this was built in the 60s biamp a it cannot be built any more everything has to follow apparently those a wedding-cake configurations this is the building that I'm going to show you blue a 17-story building for residential purposes and the zoning requirements were such that you have to have a set baguettes at at at 85 feet you have to have another setback here you have to do this in that we started to play with it trying to break the mold and then I remembered of course that someone called you Ferris had also been able to do something quite good with the zoning envelope so we worked further and said that maybe the building was simultaneously about another type of playing with the constraints and secondly about a way to play with the difficulty of the repetition of a housing program you know when you have one apartment on top of another they are equal you have a strange type of rhythm of either bedroom and bathroom or bedroom and living room and so on so in that neighborhood the lowest side which is quite particular because of its extraordinary diversity of population this ethnic mix and also different businesses and shops and so on we were started to be quite interested in the idea of pixelation in other words starting to play with apartments that would not be identical on each floor and starting to this is from Williamsburg Bridge and you are entering the city and playing with the geometry of the building so that the combination between the geometry which is entirely I mean very strictly the Deering with what is allowed within the zoning code on one hand and of course any developer client wants every square foot every square meter that they can get out of it so you maximize it and it's the maximizing of what you get out of those constraints that allows you the another an additional freedom in in the city some view from the back of the blue tower so context I mentioned a seven years six years ago 911 every architect in the city was of course highly traumatized so traumatized that I would say no more than 48 hours after the tragedy Architects had already sketches and designed to rebuild the World Trade Center we are quickly do two months later exhibition in our galleries in the city less than a year later a special issue of the New York Times a lot of discussion what sheet I went to one of those meetings and we were ten celebrated architects in New York each having all the right credentials and they began to talk to one another and the first one said it's got to be horizontal the second one said no it's got to be vertical the third one say the secret is in the section we never got to agree I left and started to look at something which had very little to do with the building start with indeed yes of course we all interested in tall buildings we all interested in mixed programs in this particular case it's after the twin tower it's a tri tower and some of you might even see reminiscences of Leonid of strike tower at the Kremlin but with vey large floors that gives the type of trading room that is necessary in our contemporary you know financial economy or whatever but it's not about that anybody can draw that the question was what was becoming of the city at the time and let me tell you a little story a at the time the time when you nicely enough introduced you know me at the time I was a DA a I was fascinated by avant-garde cinema and especially what some Russian filmmakers were doing and one particular man called a Kuleshov attested one particular experiment a fascinating experiment he would take the face of an actor absolutely without expression just deadpan and then at the back behind in the background would either put a pastoral landscape with fields of weeds and sunshine and and so on and then he would replace it by a railway station with people running or crying and so on and then a third image where they would be the noise of war and and all that and he would ask the audience what do you see in the face of the actor the actress face was always the same that ban just like this and they say ho ho in the first image he looks happy he looks relaxed in the second image he looks sad he's leading his family in the third image they said he looks terrified it's war no it was the same face so I tried to do the same thing with a the tri towers so first of course there were many victims so that's the 21st century century city of eternal memory Oh in Bush America that's what they were after I suppose but of course for all of us who think that the city should be buzzing maybe that's it it's like the face doesn't it changes expressions right so somewhere architecture is not that neutral and of course can wait for it to happen now it can even do this what happens when you repeat the same thing again and again and again again it changes its significance not so simple isn't it architecture 21st century final project back to where we started so what we do we do with the Acropolis ninth you know three hundred meters away with things you cannot touch and with a frieze that is really one of the goals of the building to repatriate so the first thing we started to look at of course is what we didn't want to do I got accused again and again by some corners of the conservative press in in in Athens of not doing this that's in York in Paris in Washington we wouldn't do that of course but they were interesting things the Acropolis the Parthenon the city of Athens the site exactly at the edge of the city just surrounding the rock that's the site and the street pattern I was quite interesting in many ways the role of the Parthenon as I mentioned the frieze which used to be here the one of the first thing I said we're going to locate the frieze exactly in the same location as it was another thing which was very important was of course movement movement in the building is part of my own interest it's also one of the fascinating thing whenever you do a building museum as an architect it's both about movement in space and movement in time and so here is again the Acropolis on the side so what do you do that's here the the remnants of the archeological things okay so what we said was let's address through the building those different conditions here the personal will be visible from a glass enclosure you will have the fries the fries that was in the past non that for preservation reason has to be now indoors we will put the fries here in such a way that it'll be possible to simultaneously watch the fries and watch the partner regarding the archeological remnants we're just going to have the building hovering as on stilts on visibility over the archeological remnants any in between we'll have the rest of the collection of course Greece has an increased not only about the frieze as an incredible wealth of artifact of sculptures of you have statues which will all be in here this part is specifically for the pieces that were in the partnering cells the Phidias sculptures such as the pediment the metaphase and so on so when you enter the building and here just diagram before showing you so simply the photograph of the building as it is at this this week almost you enter and you walk over the on glass over the the archeological remnants the the columns are delicately sort of inserted between different parts of the building itself you enter inside the building through a ramp which is entirely made of glass so that you can look through the glass on through the ramp down to the excavations you get to the major space which is the one of the general if you want the general collection hypostyle room in other words a room of a tall columns 24 feet high eight meters high by the way these glass translucent glass will not be there anymore we found that the room was strong enough to and beautiful enough on the corners we've it's so beautiful that we didn't need this and then you arrive at the top and simultaneously you see the metal piece you see the fries and here the the Parthenon itself the building with its tripartite organization the frieze sorry the depart over the archeological remnants the part with the flea is looking to the partner and be intermediate a base a medium and a top again hovering over and now you recognize strangely enough that game of superimposition that you saw it la Villette that you saw in the chinese project of seven nine eight oh eight laughs Renoir the game requires in this particular case an incredible precision these are the ancient walls these are the columns that you bring down literally inches away from the existing wall I spend days and days negotiating the location of every one of those columns with the archaeologist and simultaneously with my structural engineers because Greece is an earthquake country and your engineers don't like when you move camera columns left and right all the time to such an extent that EFT we finally arrived to where we wanted we developed a so-called and that's a system which has been well it rehearsed both in California and in in in in Japan but which was not available in Greece we had to change the Greek law to make it possible namely something called the base installation system where the lower part of the building is anchored deep into the ground while the upper part of the building is actually on wheels or on your see in a second on these type of things but they shoes they are they like caps they are about four feet wide over one meter 20 and they covered with Teflon and they allow the upper part of the building to move back and forth independently from the lower part of the building thereby protecting both parts so you see them actually in place here they huge things right anyway so interestingly enough while we're building that's that's very very large building with all the most contemporary technology excavations keep taking place and you see the two architectures people down there using quite different mechanical tools and the speed and the difference made you realize that the speed of the archaeologists is 400 years yours is less than four so and then see here how the whole thing works then by the way just using thing the cleaning every one of those stones and packaging them they're being transported that this very moment is these few weeks from the old museum at the top of the Acropolis to the new museum and here you see the the Acropolis the the Acropolis the thousand on the old museum things been brought here into the museum itself the new building some views of it still practically empty with the upper part the the glass looking towards the Acropolis the fins that ain't towards the hill towards the top the rock and then you can see again the the glass in between we are here over the archeological parts these are these openings towards the Acropolis and the glass envelope the glass I want that's another lecture of talking about hard you built an entirely glass envelope in a country weights often 40 degrees centigrade above 110 degrees Fahrenheit the whole a recycling of air and the cooling and all that is a study in itself the fritting as it's now carrying the top and then comes in is almost non-existent then gets darker again all these are quite a fascinating study another part of the materialization of a concept being architecture but that's not going to be tonight's lecture some views again at the building where you see the archeological remnants the glass floor here the general gallery and the piece of the department gallery and this is no so-called formal move it's simply as I mentioned the IPPS yeah simply this rectangular enclosure is parallel to the path now in order to get the same light condition for the frieze and this is parallel to the streets below again it's playing the conditions not composing but working with the conditions themselves and here the entrance you walk over these transparent les fleurs these are the archeological remnants this is a building that we have preserved you enter here these are getting the fins looking to the Parthenon the others on the west side the glass box and here those supporting this the big awning I'm very proud of myself after the Doric column and the core of the V on ionic column and the Corinthian column I think I invented this tripartite column we're here the column is divided into three in order to avoid the the walls you see them again I think they're quite beautiful and I encourage you to use them in the future and so we the building once again becomes the this time not so much the contextualization of the concept but the conceptualization of the conf context you look through here the glass floors looking down to the excavations you go down to the excavation there'll be a catwalk you'll be able to visit them again inches apart the contemporary and the ancient here's the remnants from the second century approximately and then you walk into the building these are the entrance hall events through the the the other Bobby and so on then through the glass ramp that I mentioned earlier as you come in get into the incredible tripartite I assure you not tripod whatever hypostyle a column the room and these will have have blinds that come down depending on the amount of life these are not as certain from someone this saw that the electric neon light no no they are skylights they bring natural right into the space and amusingly now this is a model we are the moments proceeding in placing all those sculptures we have little models of every one of those and we are testing I will be located and then you arrive at the top of the building in the so-called Parthenon gallery where you have an extraordinary view of the Parthenon and the Acropolis through the glass and the glass enclosure this is in Waiting right you have here the immune amusing thing that will be you see deep insert thin insert why the the blocks of the frieze so-called Lord Elgin marbles the blocks in essence about 40% of them are blocks they about this deep about two and a half feet deep the one at the British Museum they call them slab because Lord Elgin cut them so they would be only tense 12 centimeters wide so he could travel with them so here you'll have Lord Elgin British Museum slab and here we have the Greek ones again British Museum so it's ready waiting for it Cameron a view still columns and again very simple in terms of material these again materialization of the concept it's simply marble floor it's actually a beige marble the Celtic photograph doesn't quite show it it's still dusty still construction area the concrete a core here that core by the way has all the fire stairs and all that stuff and the glass of course a view of the building itself the play between the contemporary and and the historical view from one of the small streets as the Parthenon gallery sort of move slightly off due to its orientation and an aerial view the building which by the way the construction of the building is almost finished it will finish by enlarge the now we're installing the sculptures themselves that's going to take between eight and ten months due to the fact that it's such a precious material the to the everything is moved through very large cranes three cranes that take it from the old museum welcome back no it's too far from the old museum a crane takes a turn 180 degrees brings it to the next screen that takes it 180 degrees bring it to the third crane 180 degrees and brings it very quite carefully into the museum so end of next year so through these few example the point that I've been trying to make is simply that architecture is not in and of itself simply as one used to say an autonomously it's by and large always a mode of approaching some issues that go far beyond architectural issues in other words architecture is a way to look at the world thank okay breath is ask me you want it to ask question I'd be pleased to two hands let me start with people compose thoughts on this then a couple of points come up as you present the projects if I could ask two questions the first one would be as you talked about context over and over again with the projects tonight one of the striking features is the role some form of infrastructure ends up playing either in the discussion of what the context is or is the diagram that seems to very much drive the project so kind of infrastructural Sensibility almost the choreography of the movement of people internally through the building the movement of views out and I'm wondering if infrastructure is a concept that comes in early in the projects and I'm particularly interested in terms of the biography and the diagrams of infrastructure movement in an office like music candelas woods which over and over again seem to frame even the notion of a context around infrastructure two things a first thanks for bringing this up it's amusing that words of a in a way very tricky very dangerous I'm always worried when they carry with themselves an enormous baggage infrastructure is both a good word in a bad word in other words in the say in the 50s 60s when Robert Moses was designing a new infrastructure from New York City it quickly became a bad word when in the in early 90s a generation of architect young generation of architect wanted to get rid of the formula chromatics Frank Gehry reinvented the word infrastructure so words tend to change a connotations over the years not unlike you know the face of the Kuleshov actor so that's why I'm always cautious with it and I prefer often to bring them to very simple words like you know the word movement the word movement has an inevitability everything moves everybody every body moves in space but when you mention candle is religion words I can't help singing ho ho that reminds me cm that reminds me the smithson that reminds me the Sheffield plan which was about movement factors so in other words you find out that there are certain conversation in history that tend to move around you know you talked about my interest with notations the most beautiful drawing that Louie Kahn has ever produced it's a parking garage plan for the city of Philadelphia made of hundreds or thousands of little arrows that you draw by end and that shows the active you know sort of dynamics of that particular city and of a certain man form of urbanism so in other words yes this is unbelievably important that is and I like it you know with my saying watch it I'm worried about that work I still like the word because it has a certain level of objectivity you know it talks about analysis it talks about trying to understand the larger scale of things but yet again I see careful a nevertheless I think that any architect is by its very skill by the very size something which is analytical and requires this type of abstraction so find for infrastructure there was one other word that came to mind is a question that the at the end of the conversation I'm wondering if you might reflect on a word like speed and let's say the acceleration of your own projects the speed with which you now operate and the experience what's that been like in the in the studio or in the office itself to think of lavallette over the course of I don't know twelve or thirteen years from the moment of the competition it unfolds at a speed that in lake capital early 21st century speed is almost a already a moment of history and I'm just curious about the role that speed plays in your own thinking now and the unfolding of the projects and how they're developing lavallette took 15 years rank that was not a sassed project six different governments a calling and I have to present it to six different prime ministers and whatever each of them being against the project and that's probably why the project is so good you had to explain it many many times and realize what is important in it or not and yet at the same time there is also a tremendous acceleration in architecture today and that I'm in a way I'm going not quite to answer your question but talk about speed what is happening right now the speed of production is absolutely amazing the production of images that has been made possible by a combination of technology and the economy makes the time of thinking totally obsolete in relationship to the time of production we're talking about the exhibition you're not next door to you at the time there was hardly anything that was being built except by large corporate offices and the economy was not so good you know 1975 is when New York threatens to go bankrupt and Covent Garden you could buy you know a whole house for five thousand pounds probably less than that so the speed was a different one it was very quick in terms of thinking my god people had a very lively mind but they didn't built fast I would say right now may I say that the speed of thinking is rather slow the speed of building is really booming how we doing it ourselves well it's a strange type of office you know half of it is in New York the other hand is in terrace we do plans you know in the in one section in the other everything goes through a server in the next morning and things move around at remarkable speed but that also may be a sign at the time it doesn't actually mean that we do not think but what I find quite fascinating is that that speed of the architecture of this course as indeed shifted in relationship to the speed of the production this course I open it up to questions in the audience well nah I was fascinated with your lecture for a number of reasons partly because I was amazed at your ability to so brilliantly demonstrate the cause and effect background to your projects to every single project even both why because in effect elements in the case of level ed for instance have had to be rethought later to some extent and you show really brilliantly how the context and the content really very very clearly generate reform and lead lead and interact with a concept to generate the form but what about what you have what you have not mentioned the fact what about the unexplainable moves they must be unexplainable moves or are they not expand explain remove the Joker card I remember the times when you know when we would play the game when I would give a talk where you would throw in a slide that had nothing to do neither with the context nor with the content it was something out of somewhere else whereas you have very clearly been very careful in every project to show how it emerged out of what you use the goal or still core may be left foster if adults like there is no other solution I didn't exercise in a free arbiter here it is kind of dictated by the circumstances are so many constraints it leads to this now I'm challenging this donor and sharing rings because there are very Joker cards there are Joker cards and if when you mention loot camo and the we totality secure on the Mishnah Kudo and Atari the whole point of that image was to say I challenge you to find a connection between these elements you know the umbrella and the same has nothing to do with this acting table your lecture has been to show that it always has something to do and somehow it always ties together and somehow the incredible example the Kuleshov face means or all intentions are always recuperated by the content by the context no matter what and so I'm just asking you what is your position for safa on this a lot of the discourse of the radical avant-garde of to which you belong there now a lot of our discourse has been to say maybe we can do something that cannot be explained in terms of content or context maybe we in a total catatonic music but trying to say this is something that you cannot explain in terms of any constraints that are measurable and understandable so I just wonder what is the hidden discourse behind your discourse the problem about giving a talk in this room is there's a few people who know you too well so I'll start by giving an answer that you know only too well you know when people asked me why the color red I said because red is not a color okay I check I take your question as a challenge next time I come here I will try to show only those move that you describe because of course that plenty of them and why when do they happen when do they happen they happen every time there is a missing link you go through a series a very rational moves I will go through the forces of analysis error analysis of thinking of how you solve the thing the most rational way possible until the moment these are the same thing I can't I've got to put a variable there that's not in the game what you call the Joker or what one Zico calls in mathematics the parameter yeah the color red thank you the questions thank you for a very interesting lecture first of all and I would like to ask you about making a form just for the sake of making the form it's probably some kind of luxury for an architect and a luxury luxury for a client as well but what if the sides requires the luxury I don't think it ever happens that you can do the luxury of making a form for the sake of making a form you do that occasionally just for yourself for fun right oh just to investigate you explore certain vocabulary but even you know even a musician is not just going to make notes of music it's going to play around a certain exploration of chords or rhythm or whatever so in other words even if you have absolutely nobody in front of you giving you a set of conditions and of constraints you yourself in order to develop anything you are going to give you a series of frames in a sense so you do that all the time when you find yourself in a quote quote real situation they are always constraints and those constraints either you try to go against them or use them to your advantage or play with them but let me give you an example let's leave architecture for a second for a long period of time we'll use simply that the 50s and 60s dancers required or requested always a perfect white space in order to do them dance movement and their creative self at one moment that you became really interested in taking over the rooftops of Manhattan's Lots with a cast-iron columns and so on and simply by playing on those constraints of those Browns reinvented completely the vocabulary of dance it's not that different in architecture you talk about architecture being the materialization of concept I was just concept t context concept I was just wondering how much time do you actually spend in developing in developing these contexts and if you are ever really sort of satisfied with them who first we don't develop context they are there they around them around us except we might take a long time to recognize that that's something else however when you ask me how much time we spend developing a concept it all depends you know I'll give you two examples of never ever buildings here the in the case of the Franois with a big roof seconds I went to the site I said wow that's what we need to do the other project I struggle for weeks weeks and weeks till I get to a concept that I'm satisfied with worse than that it has happened to me that I want a competition without having the concept yet and then still struggle for few months after that till it would arrive yes it all depends it's not an easy one right but I will not be satisfied before a concept which has it's funny the word concept is also slightly old word right it's their words i we talked about the infrastructure you know they're words that we use much more during a certain period that they are you now run for me or it's still an important word but one has to go back to the time when also it was used in a very particular manner back to the time of the exhibition next door 1970s there is a strong reaction cultural political social against a certain form of bourgeois art called painting sculpture all those categories and the market the art market that goes with it so a number of artists start to talk about concept art of conceptual art together with them a few others discover that they can take over a landscape you know land earth suddenly we invent certain things through the use of photography or through the use of carving or moving rocks around namely a form of minimal thinking takes place minimal art and so on so that brings a period where a certain requestion a radical questioning takes place not surprisingly it's also the time another form of outcomes performer arts where there are no painting no no sculptures but the body is that you know protagonist of the art piece namely with the word is also attached a cultural context a political context of course today that's not quite the same situation anymore I will keep the word for a very simple reason it's a word that exists that's why I have you know I'm trying to resurrect the word context which has been absolutely destroyed by the Friends of I don't know a Majesty Prince of Wales or something like that right it's not at all about that it's simply that the the level of abstraction that is necessary to architecture to really move ahead is something that I'm fascinated with and that's why I will you know work within it but back to you know you don't find concept under your bed every day it takes a wine it's my go but there's a word that keeps swirling around in my mind and I think you've explained wonderfully that the progression towards the creation of a building I think your buildings are are quite a formal in their expression but behind it there's an immense passion and all the games that they're Colin has referred to but when the building actually exists it then has another job to do it has to seduce the the user of the building and I'm particularly interested in the the role of seduction in the Athenian building which has to seduce the British government the Cancer Council of the governors of the British Museum to to actually really fulfill this this ultimate acts of act of seduction so whether this notion of seduction has anything to do with what Colin was talking about I think perhaps it does and how that relates to the act of seduction or the many acts of seduction that the building might perform once it exists typical Nigel coats right you know it's it's a it's like a gun a double-barrel gun and because on on level number one a it's about pleasure right and I don't think the trustees of the British Museum ital about pleasure they all about power so in in so I'll address first pleasure and then power so pleasure I'm sure every building at one moment is part of the experience of the senses whatever whether at a distance or part of it it's something that is not that has nothing to do with anything that I've told you tonight forget it it's all about an immediate intuitive you know preemption sort of the building itself and one tries to do it and I tell you may be the materialization of a concept has to do with that materiality we have been always fascinated by this and this and the sound that it would make head so in other words and yeah that's how you can build but in other words you the way you make things it's a form of a intuitive a physical pleasure that cannot be described with words and for that it's part of what we do when may you uh perhaps right maybe touches a Tom Collins question the other one regarding the trustees and then McGregor and those guys across you know Gao Street I'll leave that to to them to answer oh yeah okay so no no no no no let me just tell you the official position that the of the British government of the British Museum is never meanwhile meanwhile they have been a number of talks between a essence both at the level of the museum and the level of the highest level of government in terms of trying to find out diplomatic mechanisms for some openings to take place but that's all I can say at this time should we do one more question anyone and I wanted to ask you said that context isn't about the visual it's about the social and the political and my question is is that not a little bit of an easy separation because what we seem so reluctant to talk about the visual in your in your building in the lower Eastside with the apartment blocks that you separated you talked about the pixelization of society and how there's different cultures but ultimately the way you translate that into a building is a pixelated visual and aesthetic so how how strong is that distinction between the social and the political and don't you somehow turn back to the visual when when I said it's not the visual I really said it's not only the visual that's very important no I have no problem with a visual we work with in the end I think if we architect this probably because we're reasonably good at it and we should not leave that to others so please keep control over the visual but at the same time your capability of doing certain things is also a reflection of your ability to understand how to take advantage of other contexts such as the social the political the culture etc etc so all that is together my my statement had very much to do against a group of people who are intensely visual also they thought and they call themselves the contacts realists you remember down Trafalgar Square venturi you know doing a building that was there to please because it was code called contextual that's not what I'm talking about yet it's not a reason to say that you can do buildings that have absolutely you know that like a like a boring 77478 can fly anywhere and land at any part of the world we do a slightly different job and this i'm youngins might sound like it's probably narrow-minded and british as well but if the am if you were if you were seen as the person who got the Elgin marbles back to Athens right would you if if it if it happened that you became this sort of figurehead of M artifacts which didn't belong to the country that they would expose then would you be happy with that sort of but persona and all with you sort of worried that it might actually start a precedent you personally a precedent yeah like say because I mean I'm guessing most of the stuff in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an all-american yeah yeah and you know something Scott available to do with with me personally just let's lead me out a bit there for a minute that's what people what some museum curators and directors are very concerned about is that exactly it may start an exodus but at the same time then we may say that the conditions in the 21st century are not the same as they were in the 19th century and that institution do evolve you know religion is not the same as it was and the museum and calcium may not be the same as it was in the 19th century at the time everybody can travel easily and those places that were unreachable once upon a time can be reached within hours or less so suddenly there is a not a quantitative change but a qualitative change which may indeed change the nature of museums and you absolutely correct to ask the questions thank you very much thank you thanks everybody for the evening just to mention Bernards lecture carries on across the way in the exhibition gallery for the next several

Channel: AA School of Architecture

Views: 24,272

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Keywords: Architectural Association, Public Programme, 2007, Bernard Tschumi, Conceptualising Content

Id: SkeKmMxO63E

Length: 93min 58sec (5638 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 13 2015