Bernard Tschumi - Red is Not a Color

thank you everybody for coming in this evening it is a great pleasure to welcome back to the architectural Association bernard tschumi someone who knows this lectern in this room extremely well and for 40 years has been not only a vital member of the Association but also of course a renowned teacher educator architect provocateur and who has done work in this room and in fact many other rooms at the a that I think most of you in the audience will know very well we're inviting Bernard back in part to celebrate the publication of a most recent book of his works thoughts life in career read is not a color I'm quoting and not describing the book the subtitle of a book titled architecture concepts which Bernard will present in part this evening in which he can he will be tracing through the relationship between some of the recent projects buildings and other thoughts in relation to work that he's been doing for many years in his studio and as an educator in architecture I had an opportunity like many AAA students here to first encounter him in a student crit I was in the middle of the 1980s meticulously tracing Mises Barcelona pavilion to try and hand in as a 50 year project and Bernard was invited in by my unit master Peter cook to comment on the work about this time of the year and in looking at a wall full of grids the first thing Bernard did was to pick up a box of pins pushpins that were in the soft room and throw them on the floor and say that's about as orderly as anything nice ever did and in that tried to do what he's done so brilliantly so long for so many students and architects is to try and make us think differently about what it is we assumed to be order in architecture the title of this book architecture concepts is something that he introduces as a way to try and work through the extent to which architecture today really can be a form of knowledge and not as he says in his opening preface simply a discipline that one to know about form to see architecture as a cultural project is a way to summarize the many different facets of what Barnard has been doing not only in a studio but as a teacher for many many years it was at its beginning an incredibly provocative position to take to see architecture at that point in late modernism is something that sits within a larger creative and cultural field of knowledge and it's most certainly something that he used to shape what many of you will know was an iconic prototype idea of what a design unit can be here at the architectural Association I'll say something on that in a minute Barnard embodies I think an incredibly unique point of view within architecture today someone who believes we really can and will continue to learn from what other creative minds do in other fields like performance like art like choreography like filmmaking but that we look at that work from the eyes of an architect and rather than simply do that work look at how it might make us think about doing architecture differently it's certainly a hallmark of what he and his students did here at the school in the unit that he was running he is the literal embodiment of the generation of 1968 and in fact was in Paris in 1968 working for renowned modernist architects at a time in which the world rather violently changed and he literally went from that space and street to the architectural Association I think perhaps via the encouragement of Cedric price another example of Cedric shaping what architecture became and came here and of course an incredibly interesting moment in which the relatively stable modernist idea that a school is quite rigidly structured could in fact break open to become something that we know to still today which is a school driven by very unique very distinctive agendas aims and ideas that we think of his units and that's something that he put in place in diploma unit 10 in about 1973 and for those of you that don't know one of the first things Bernard asked his students to do was to make a magazine and not a building to challenge even schools like this in really unexpected ways and the to chronicles that are produced I think are still an incredible record of what was happening in architecture at that time Barnard left here as a unit master established a practice in New York in the 1980s and in looking back now wins what's probably one of the defining projects of the latter half of the 20th century which is the competition for la Villette Park and begins work on that and soon after assumes the deanship at Columbia University and really in and I really believe this to be the case takes architectural education into the 21st century in ways that many of us would still look look to measure ourselves in relation to created ideas like paperless design studios accepted the experimental potential of new design technologies quite openly and of course brought lessons that were learned here to New York in the States in ways that really dramatically changed architecture therapy so enough of an introduction here I thought for Bernards sake I would offer a short quote that he wrote in the 1970s here in describing a unit the object of this unit is to develop experimental and polemical schemes it is deeply suspicious of the notion that architecture of cities can be improved by finding a formula for progress it rejects as arrogance the idea of enlightenment and this is a unit that will be taught through lectures and seminars as much as tutorials around projects if I think it's set a model for many of us to try and live up to as I say it produced a couple of remarkable records of its time and it's an absolute delight to welcome you back here to a home thank you I'm Brett it is like like home in many ways and do you hear me well is it all right yes okay and and much of what I'm I'm going to talk about tonight it's really all your fault and so what happened at the a throughout these years and it extend until today it's really the outer best asking questions rather than providing answers and as long as we do that I think there's some hope that architecture will be very much one of the liveliest activity you can think of and maybe the first question to ask is but what is architecture and probably I'll just follow up before talking about you know this evening lecture one of the most extraordinary thing about the a at that early time that you mentioned is that a the area was probably the only school where people where students were not taught things that the faculty already knew in other words the student having to provide the correct answer to a question that had the form will formulate you know response but rather to set the question themselves to write the program's themselves and that was quite extraordinary considering that most other places were really places which had all the answers so if you have the answers please leave the room now that's not what I'm going to talk about why do you write a book at one moment you know where it's something that you have delayed for many many years you have delayed it because you don't want to do another monograph you don't want to do another sort of promotional brochure on what the office does but really you're trying to figure out what his architecture or rather what are the basics what are the what what makes its that's important discipline or if you don't want to call it a discipline what makes it such an important human activity amusingly enough the word concept came very early in the the whole making of the book because the idea was that by the way originally the color red was also an issue that was the alternative cover I show it to you just to amuse you the publisher refused it because they said it'll never sell they want images on the cover but it's about saying that after all the color red is not about being a color it's about being an idea and because architecture is not about for architecture is not about knowledge it also isn't it is about it's not about form it is not about perception it is not even only about sensation but really it is about concept and ideas and so the starting point which very very clearly and probably I'll read it I'll be boring and I'll read it for you simply to make the point that its underlying at in our day and age icon ism it's this underlines the whole conversation in the history of the world culture the word architecture is usually associated with building a great beauty and magnitude architecture is presented at the mere knowledge of form yet it could be argued that architecture is first has more for most formal knowledge much like mathematics philosophy or art one of the most important function is generate ideas and concept around the world we about the world we live in architecture allows us to apprehend that world and it equally about asking question and provide answers to problems views or social action activity nevertheless architectures inescapable materiality is what makes it different from philosophy mathematics and literature yet but its very nature architecture involves the materialization as concept so if you ask yourself what is architecture and if you ask yourself this without wanting to resort on all the dictionary of received ideas all the cliches which existed long long before you you immediately you know sort of start to wonder whether yes you know you've watched architecture in photographs in on filming on TV also and as a student in the most classical manner you have of course learn about the villas sub-1 about the Domino principle and so on but somehow it seems all very static and quite different from the experience that you really have about architecture you know about that that's by the way that's my thesis the influenced by salary by the way you are living also in this period when it's a period of questioning and I would say today we are also in such a way in such an eerie period of transition at the time of course 68 the the World Trade Center which is a fantastic Twin Towers but at the same time absolutely hated by the critics a number of publications are coming out which are also raising a whole series of questions about what is philosophy what is humanism and names like the Louisa Basso Derrida or you know Mac user and so on are challenging these received ideas in exactly the same way as the art scene is challenging a certain empresas say Henry Moore or Anthony Caro are universally disliked I find it quite amusing today since these provide inspiration in our iconic era so the art scene wants to replace it by a critique and use conceptual art use series pieces of work which try to challenge the idea about to study movement however the movement of bodies in space the rediscovery of the body is actually something which is OK it cannot be sold and bought it's not part of the marketplace and whether it is the ninth the early 20th century of the bathhouse with Schlemmer or many of the other performance artwork quite an interesting phenomena happens is that maybe a certain way to define what you do can be through the body on one hand and through concept in ideas meet film is probably far more important then and I'm talking about this 70s than it is today a whole generation if you think of nouvelle if you should think of Kula so myself and a few others really learn everything they know about film and from the Russian constructivist avant-garde cinema - VIN van der so before cadaver and so on many many issues are fascinating because it is about a space a filmic space but where the space is as much a protagonist as the actors themselves if you say that space is a protagonist you may ask yourself what is the mode of notation you're going to use and we architects depend enormously on the on the mode of notation we use someone who used to teach here Robin Evans once famously wrote we architects do not build we draw and although that was true only you know starting in the 17th century before that we were on the building site the idea of drawing axonometric of perspectives has actually certain limitation it doesn't talk about movement it doesn't talk about the body doesn't talk about smell it doesn't talk about sound it's a very very limited device now suddenly you discover in a publication but I forgot filmmaking in the 20s someone who is actually trying to not aged a way to say to describe at the same time the movement of the camera the sound of the the film score the discussion or whatever movement the various actors and in in other words suddenly you realize that there are certain modes of notation that have a lot to do about a far more complex and experimentation about what architecture is and then movement being what it is you learn from film I'm not going to go into details whether it is expressionist cinema or futurist whatever look simply at the building on the top right of the left page the carpenter center is a fascinating building because you realize there's a ram that intersect with the building somehow misses it doesn't quite work and building that do not quite work out always interesting because sometime you can keep the keep asking the question they do not so in other words we're talking about things which are not there in stuck in stone look at the the the dancer on the right it's not at all someone who is dancing in the perfect white space of the gallery's environment on the contrary it's starting to use the surrounding call it the context to call it whatever in other words the protagonists of the dance the chimney tops tops to the the water towers etc in other words it defines a form of architecture which is just as much about the movement of the body in space as it is about a what surrounded in other words there is not and this is a coin a phrase that COI was going here in the unit at the time there is no space without something that happens in it this is not the same on the left on the right and of course it has that materiality you know you have a conceptual you maybe at one moment a reality of what you are dealing with architecture is built it's not like mathematics and I've always been fascinated by this mosque in journey in Mali where you have every year to rebuild part of the mosque with the whole eight thousand inhabitants of the village because of the rainy season so in other words it is simply architecture in action so the question of architecture has to express itself in one way or another any now day and age of advertisements and of commercial let's say a consumer society it was tempting to ask yourself the following question why don't we do advertisement for architecture try to sell the idea of constraint the idea of decay the idea that architecture is never something that is a certainty but on the country Kerry's answered the care is constrained and you better like them like I'm the image on the right and these advertisements were put in a series of magazines as imagine you're being asked to write an article and you tell the editor yes or do the article provided let me put an ad in your so question of spaces is really the starting point the word space is important because the word space has no quality per se as opposed to the word architecture you can talk with artist and musician when you use the word space when you use the word architecture you get in trouble will you hear cliches like architecture is frozen music and you hate to hear that so you rather take the word space and all possibly say maybe let's not use the regular sort of programs and that was again and it's why I say you know so much will it happen in this building when instead of giving a program we started to suggest that he has about giving a novel and taking a novel by Italo Calvino or the hamon essay over Edgar Allan Poe and a few others eventually ending with James Joyce because James Joyce was really the epitome of complexity for for for for some of us so much so that I thought I have to do it myself because I had no idea what the student could come up with so this project became an important project at the at the beginning of the the work as you can recognize the first sort of hint of the point great the point where it was actually the Admiralty map which was taken on on Covent Garden and each student had one of the intersections of the grid and as a location of their project a first point great work and then the idea of those Follies continued in New York as strangely enough one starts to work and spends a lot of time with other disciplines while you talk to writers you talk to a 2/2 artist and eventually they return the favor and they ask you to do pieces in that case it used to be called site-specific sculptures which is a pretty horrible you know name but nevertheless with the opportunity for someone who is not an artist but not quite an architect either to do pieces of work which were built temporarily and which were beginning that experimentation so you don't know how to call them you call them Follies because it gives a strange feeling of unreasonableness they are unreasonable you're still fascinating and fascinated by developing an argument it's all about an argument and by the way the reason the book is constantly interspersed with certain texts is that quite often when you use different media if you use drawing you can get certain answers or certain you know raise certain issues in a certain way if you write about them then something else happens it becomes a different type of logic the media is different if you use video the media is again different and every time every time you get closer to the to what you're looking for so many in the book many of these texts and in at the same time trying to do architecture without starting with facade with volumes or what architecture normally looks like in architectural magazine meant that one had perhaps to look at other areas in this case film was again as I mentioned something terribly important taking the movement of the protagonist in Spain in the film and trying to trace them trying to map them as a sort of choreography and the choreography itself becomes the traces of an architecture to come without getting into details it's all about the materialization of movements into architecture you look for precedents you have some again in architecture whether they work or not the Manhattan transcripts are nothing but that continuation is to say how's about writing a b-movie or not a detective novel but trying to use a series of architectural devices and explore those architectural devices without having to rely on the prevalent world of ideas the prevalent flaw or other world images which you see in the magazines or in you know the the prices that the IBA gives so that the Pritzker gives that didn't exist well yes it did actually in other words something that was fairly predictable as so hence the Manhattan transcript were that form of a exploration for example this drawing which is 30 feet long which is literally a walk through 42nd Street the the murderer has come out of jail moves through the street and counters gets killed etc and it's a mode of exploration that has a narrative dimension but the narrative dimension is not because you're interested in the tall storytelling you're interested in the serial nature of architectural transformations in a way but of course as I said you don't call it architecture so whether it's the archetype of the park or the archetype of the street or the archetype of the tower the fall in a tower it's basically the attempt to develop a mode of notation again the word notation is important you have to invent your own mode of notation otherwise you fall back is as if you were to write a novel using the style of somebody else you better try unless you are into a certain type of parody you are into finding a voice of your own and so the the older early question was all about space event and movement and the parc de la vie let's the story is very well known was simply at the time the the first competition that's you you've done all that research worker that you have shown in our galleries you have shown it in various publications or talk and at one moment you say ha that's enough let's test it on somebody else program not a murder story anymore not a detective story let's try on somebody else's program so the Parc de la vie let the part is interesting because it can be anything you know it doesn't really have a definition and you get a 500-page sort of program but you can't do much with it so you reinvent what it is using those concepts and ideas that were explored in the preceding years in a way which was totally free from any preconceived notions of what architecture was so without getting into details you you do something that I still do today which is immediately look at the different alternatives you never come to an idea immediately you may have an intuition but in reality you test different combination and permutations and you do it in such a way that it opens a field and maybe maybe they you might either find what you're looking for or invent type or a new concept that the project is known so I don't want to get into it the the superimposition of point line and surfaces is really what is the most important in other words it's not about individual follies who cares about knowledge we're really what is important is that you have three systems three logics that are totally autonomous from one another that you superimpose to one another and they be sometime reinforce one another or they contradict one another and brings you something else now the reason why I show those two images is that sometimes some competitions are extremely important in as a as a way to be how could you call that stocktaking of what where architecture is the image on the left is a drawing by someone who is also teaching here at the time it's 1976 is Leon Correa that was not the actual lafayette competition it was prior to the end it was simply a now the idea competition it was not for the real job Leon did such an extraordinary sub work that several hundred young architects who did that country competition were completely amazed and that project had an incredible influence on a whole generation and interestingly enough so that you could call the history ceased postmodern you know generation interesting enough when in 1982-83 there was the new level at a lot of people have written about you know the rivalry between REM koolhaas and myself not so simple in reality the person I was trying UPS the person I was really trying to beat was early on Korea who had done such an extraordinary project six years earlier and define in a way a generation so at that time the early eighties there's something else which is happening which is the beginning of the year and I don't want to use the word deconstruction we have dismantling some of the ideals or the certainties of the hysteresis period soaps are going the wrong way a so and some but I don't be able to amusingly enough look extraordinary about Neal Porter and so a lot of names as I had no office the the lavallette was done literally at the corner of a kitchen table and I had no office when I wanted and immediately called people without the slightest idea how you put a building you know interestingly enough lobulated was very much about import and export between different disciplines I had thought let's have artists working with landscape architects and so on and as you can see on the project on the on the bottom right the when I tried to marry Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida to do a garden together that could be a lecture on its own I'm sure Peter has done it the project was not built for mostly going vastly over budget but an interesting so some some I so I got a further oops and move on to other issues the mode of notation is interesting because suddenly it allows you to explore other fields in Brett's what two years ago suggested it so probably most of you we're not here yet probably the most rainy day in London in generations had the idea that we would do a remake of the fireworks here in Bedford Square a firework worked we were soaked and tried to indeed do that three-dimensional way of space anyway the point is a much of the discussion was if you don't want to talk about form and about architecture as a as a series of iconic images maybe you have to start about program and this is an image which probably has haunted me ever since would you what do you think it is is it a church is it a gym is it a voting place it's all of the above maybe the fact that there is no cause-and-effect relationship between what happens in a space and in the space itself is a fascinating notion there is no functionalism in all that it's sort of saying yes sure you can have ideal kitchen all right where everything is reinforcing everything else but you can have things which are totally contradictory and conflictual like playing hockey in the living room it's such we're all in different oh you simply use displacement like the earlier vanguard and say Marcel Duchamp Oh even playing with technologies when the same architect Frank Lloyd Wright does a parking garage and then he does a museum at the same time so this relativity is something that you get quite fascinated with especially when you see certain precedents about a quote quote context this is a civics is I think it's a very important theremin is called the Kuleshov experiment it's a filmmaker in the 20s take the the this the absolutely plain unmoving face of the of the actor and through montage puts right next to it dead figure a bowl of soup or a very beautiful young woman and ask the audience what you read in the face of the director those on the left and on the right are two different versions of the same film and of course the audience says on the first one the actor is said on the second one they say he's is hungry and then this is full of lust and in reality you know that is simply the juxtaposition of the two that makes it if I make this space here in this room if I turn it into a place which is a mini boxing ring the nature of the architecture changes so and of course cities are the most fascinating part of it because as you can see cities are by definition the place that comes at series of conflict and constraints a building right on the right right next to the office in New York which has been used as a church as a department as a sort of second hand clothing place as a storage barn and etc etc etc so programmatic the Association are really important and you keep exploring this a series of competitions competitions are very important at the time because the whole generation is testing ideas the the Tokyo Opera here or the the large library in Paris you find the same the same people are all competing against one another you competing even you know cedric even at la Villette it becomes a conversation that you have about those different pieces of work here the running track that goes through the the library in other words testing some of the concept in the competitions themselves you always get second prize or third prize at a time even comes IronPort against some of the largest firms in the world talking about the linear city ran the wins but you get a second prize you get encouraged to keep working and eventually of course it strikes second project we did was not conscious center where there was an existing building which you see here on the top left which was quite extraordinary because it was really ruin it had been abandoned for 25 years but it has these large interior spaces fantastic like a landscape of roofs and instead of demolishing it it had gotten its demolition permit you say hey I'm going to keep it I'm going to put a big roof over it and then use it as a found object not unlike what Marcel Duchamp does with the urinal in a museum simply by D contextualizing it turns it into something else and then the space becomes not a composition but becomes something that you have actually obtained through the result of a strategy so the concept itself is what gives you the phone and not the other way around the concept is the superimposition of the roof the new roof over the by the way it's also it was a comment on the whole of the yeah that I would say that's found found space in a way the result of the strategy but what I wanted to show you maybe I don't have that image know is that it was also the time the context reality where people had to do buildings that looked like their context here you say no it's all about dialogue and not about imitation of the context so we've been talking about a space movement events we'll be talking about program and then slowly you realize that there is one thing you cannot escape whether you like it or not you've talked about movement so vectors are already in the conversation but somehow they are there is an issue which is called envelope and while the way they become quite fashionable now in reality you look at the image on the right there's somebody called Buckminster Fuller who was really frankly hated not hated by architects but completely dismissed by them he was not a narc attacked think of the architectural scene in America he would never be celebrated here the people who like the boxy where people like Reyner Banham or cedric price or allogram but these were not considered like architects as architects either but the idea of saying you talk about an envelope is quite fascinating because it means it doesn't have really a facade it doesn't have a roof look at the image on on the left you know the renaissance is invented the facade didn't exist really before the wall the walls themselves were carrying the building and that's what what you saw well the facade is an applique is something which is placed on top of it and that suddenly is the place where you do architectural code code composition and the aesthetics and so on so suddenly take this differentiates taking the facade out of the envelope was a very interesting and important moment at the same time the idea of vectors was something which well I'll get back to the vectors but the glasshouse like Shiro the various glass houses by Mies and bye-bye-bye Johnson and I'll get back to that in a minute the use of transparency were interesting question that were asked because did it work was it facades and of course vectors that's now a so the second this third set of question is and as I mentioned starting every one of those part the book is in five parts is there to explore to ask what is architecture what other thing that you can call it basics or fundamentals that you cannot avoid what you you have just that you have to deal with gravity you'd have to deal with movements so series of project and experiments are made about taking very often the de champion attitude making the movement vectors completely random throwing them as a piece of string on the floor and saying these are going to be the ramps or so on or more recently testing here in a project with someone who is also was also an a graduate shoe Dutton I met through Peter rice many years ago we did this walkway this bridge over over the tracks together trying to avoid every formal any formal move but rather using the forces of tension and compression to determine what the the envelope would be so if you want it simultaneously a vector and an envelope with the particularities where you have maximum compression Manor matter therefore the building is nearly solid however at places where you have maximum tension like in sorry in any bridge then it becomes almost entirely transparent so that issue the the nature of the envelope and the forces they deal with it inevitably us yourself has about glass and you ask to do a small gallery temporary gallery in a Dutch city in Groningen and you say ha now nice did a glass house but was it really a glass house after all if I take the glass out of the means building I still have a marble you know floor or travel drawing or whatever it was and I have a steel and concrete deck and I have a structure I still have a house what about having glass that becomes the total thing that is if you take off the glass the glass then the building simply disappears so the beam are made of glass we are talking about something which was built not now almost 25 years ago the glass were made the beam and the column were made of glass and therefore if you take them out the building simply ceases to exist and you could say that this was the real glass house with also the defect amusingly enough the building is still now part of the burning and museum they do a lot of performances and artist installation and so on in the building which is slanted at an oblique which means that at night you a sense the reflection of the glass have a disorienting effect on your body so this issue of the envelope of course you keep exploring it and now the point that you're trying to develop out book is again not not a monograph but seeing just as with the other project with any of the project in it is how you take every one of the project in order to ask a question and in this particular case it's the question that was asked was what is their relationship between the material of the envelope and what it does so in this particular case it is a very large concert hall 7,000 seats one of those things for you know rock music popular music political meetings and all that the site is really a long highway not terribly interesting however you have to deal with sort of putting these seven thousand people keeping the rain out you separate the two two envelopes you have one envelope in to put the people inside and another envelope to keep the rain out the first one is made of concrete the second one is made of steel and in between you have circulations people themselves you know so the outer one is just metal the seats are not part of your argument so you make them transparent but but it's nice because when people walk in is they sort of play with the light and all that and so that's the first way to answer that question but then people like it if the sound is good you being invited to another competition you win the competition and this time you are in a forest the fantastic forest 200 years old trees and you say hey am same program what about them taking the same program the same concept same concepts in context but then trying to change the material and here so the the answer or the the let's say the investigation or experimentation was to say let's make the outer envelope made of polycarbonate transparent translucent the inner envelope made of wood and then of course circulation in between and the notion of the in-between that we saw with the lafrana wall you know the big roof over the old roof that natured in between is also very important in all the project but I won't talk about it today so then you realize something quite interesting by having change the material you have completely changed the perception of the building the concept is the same but the material is so different that the sensations are different as well in other words something happened by that very moment when you choose what materials you are going to do so in experiment further for watch Factory where you say the concept itself will have to be made in terms of say three materials steel on the outside based on wood as an in inner lining and then all circulation is going to be made of glass so there is a way to cons if I say that architecture is the materialization of a concept then you conceptualize that materiality or you materialize that concept and the building itself is exactly this in other words an outer envelope in steel and in an envelope in wood and all major circulation of the building are simply translucent or transparent glass the rigor of the demonstrations is interesting in other words it's a little bit like a mathematician who tried to demonstrate a proposition is as few lines as few words as possible in this particular case is us trying to demonstrate it in as few material as so you arrive then in this proposition that you every project that one does is an architect has to have a concept it has to have it has a context we're not building in outer space even outer space would be context of souls and it has to have a Content what we call program area earlier on and that's rather interesting because you always stuck with these and so you decide you know what you are going to you're going to play with them and you look at what other people did look at the the the example that we all know about about Frank Gehry and Bilbao and and then the Museu the Disney Concert Hall how many of you are able immediately to distinguish which which one is Bilbao and which one is listening not so easy isn't it well it has always existed look the lateral rate monastery and the Boston City Hall or the villa rotunda by Palladio in near which Anza and not very far from here in Chizik a Palladian villa so these doubles all these ways to discuss how a you know building gets its own character and you know influence through the circumstances in which the conditions in which in take place imagine now you are doing a competition thinking they're very few likelihood you're going to win it's very very small it's always very good to do this type of competition because you're quite relaxed about doing them so you enter a competition to do a new building and for the Acropolis Museum you know that most museum including the British Museum not far from here I have looked like a party on your site by the way is 300 feet from the Parthenon so that's what first an interesting challenge how do you as an architect compete with the path none can you do that so you have here to be very very lucky I say arrogant then you have another particularities on the site is that it's filled with with ruins archeological remnants and you told you're not supposed to touch them and thirdly one of the key reason to do that building is to convince the brits the people next door to return the Elgin bubble to the Greeks so three conditions one that has to do with the Acropolis up there the second one which has to do with the marbles and the third one which has to do with the archeology the concept itself then becomes the derivation who is directly an expression of those particular constraints in other words a glass rectangle that houses the the frieze come back to the frieze in a minute which is entirely glazed so you can see the frieze the part which is in in in essence at this time and the Parthenon at the same time the rest of the museum in the in-between and hovering above the archeological remnants part of the building so the building is actually a tripartite just as a concept is tripartite the building is three parts amusingly enough is still digging actually still now as we have put the building on stealth today they're still continuing the archeological research underneath the building which receives you know 10,000 people a day materials materials are fantastically important you don't want to have those beautiful marble sculptures from 2,500 years ago in front of plaster plaster wall of sheetrock the building you're building is made of concrete you say the dialogue is going to be between the existing structure the building the the concrete structure of your building so you're going to try to develop the concrete which has the beauty and also puts potentially the ability to establish dialogue with a sculpture in model itself so hence you play with the materials of the building in order to work with the material of the sculptures themselves before I get back to to this point let me just show you something that explains why I've been so obsessed about this building is that I mentioned earlier that 32 foot long drawing part of the Manhattan transcript it is a frieze the only way to look at this drawing is actually to walk along it you can't see it all at once just like the frieze which is 160 meters long you walk along it now a filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein the man who is notation I showed earlier you see on the top right had been to Athens and wrote after that a fantastic text called montage and architecture showing images of famous famous architectural treatise by Swasey and saying he the Greece the ancient Greece invented montage because of the different angles and the juxtaposition of of images like in film but the most fantastic thing and I don't think anybody has ever pointed that out this mode of notation that I've shown larger at the beginning was for a film called Alexander Nevsky and I saw Alexander Nevsky own lead while I knew the notation but I saw it only while building the building in essence and being quite familiar with the frieze and suddenly I see the film and I see that sequence that battle sequence shot in 1938 or 39 which is exactly following the Greek original classical freeze in other words import and export between cinema and sculpture here being in full swing seeing that here the film nature now after having been influenced by sculpture in you know etcetera etcetera some beautiful images by Iran ban of the the building itself way the the nature of the relationship between the marble and and the rock and Crete becomes absolutely fundamental the concrete absorbed the light while the marble reflects it so once again it's about concept and material conceptualizing and material in here viewing the the Parthenon why you're looking at the sculptures which of course have to be protected and be indoor today because of pollution and various other reasons the the big glass rectangle is exactly oriented parallel to the to the to the person on in order to have the same light quality and you can see the city as well you can hear and see the thing and what is also interesting but I probably don't have this image is that the the glass volume is slightly shifted in relationship to the true what's below it's not any constructive this deconstructive is moved is simply that the street pattern of the old city was not the same as the direction of the temple and I use that as a way to to make the parallel to the temple itself superimposition can take a lot of forms not only superimposition over ruins but all the existing building we saw the superimposition in the fern or the Art Center with a big roof here a manifesto project for factory seven nine eight I'm sure those of you have been Beijing have been to several factory seven nine eight major cultural center in Beijing now with a lot of factories that were meant to be demolished and destroyed destroyed and going there one day amusingly enough I was there with world princes we're talking about what to do about saving the place and the idea was to say ha what about simply superimposing keeping the factories and putting the ten million square feet or the 1 million square meters that as a lattice as a sort of you may know Yona Friedman as a sort of spatial City flowing as flying or hovering over the existing building there was a lot of press for that at the time a lot of TV the government decided not to demolish factory 798 possibly as a result so we never had to build anything but I thought architecture can be also a manifesto and amazing and the most of it of course but I don't want to spend much time on on the the most horrifying experience probably mine as an architect is to see the World Trade Center being demolished in front of our eyes you know a few hundred meters away I think we like building too much for that and trying to participate in the discourse and then realizing it's not about another icon but it's really what is the literally the political and the the social context of architecture it's not about images is what the images do and in this particular case that project was really testing exactly like taking the Kuleshov effect you remember the face of the actor in front of the bowl of soup or the the body in a in a casket here is taking the same try tower you know as the project but placing it in four five six different contexts from Memorial to Las Vegas Oh to a city of brotherhood hence it is not the same building and yet it is the same architecture can imagine repeating it to a turning it as a multiple thing and arrive to the final thing so you may have noticed that throughout all this time one word was never used always trying to not to use it in a way they used to be a joke in the office you know there were two things that you could never use a the color green and B the word former and so at one moment you arrived in a situation where you're stuck having to come from those two words well first of all we live in an era I would call it we just ended the icon ism era right you know when everybody is trying to do those things on the right that's basically all try to compete with one another with a sign without any significant but you realize that sometime you stuck with this type of situation if you don't have quite all the information look on those images on the left if you asked to design a city cities are so complex you have to take it one moment a shortcut you have to make an assumption you have to make a hypothesis and at that moment that I part of this may have to do with a form and that's really a little problematic because that form is the same as it a concept in other words what I would call a concept form and you see it throughout history concentric cities or the point grid of that had certainly an influence on us when we did the point grid at la village and various are the examples so the concept form is what it's an abstraction an abstraction that will then be made more figurative or more let's see contextual when you develop the scheme now let me play a second with those two words context and concept when I showed the Museum in essence we had a very complicated contact context so we would take the context and then try to meet it make it into a concept ie conceptualizing the context but some time you do exactly the opposite you have to take a concept and then to contextualize it so here we were asked to do a new city 40,000 inhabitants in that green area all that color that I don't like now that he had ever built anything there you know absolutely Dominican Republic no precedent so of course you say haha here we are Brasilia let's do our new city but it's not tabula rasa it's all that green stuff this green stuff you'd say hail trees its nature and you start to carve in the context you carve a series of forms they could have been squares they could have been circle they could have been triangles they could have been blobs in this case we made the assumptions let take ellipses call it elliptic cities that should be fine I'm eternal and all this sort of thing we have a series of spaces within the context so this abstraction means that the the way to approach it is through that concept form this is only one small part of the project the project is about six kilometers by four kilometers this is only the business centre it's about what I could call a reverse archipelago it's not about preserving certain parts of the expense of others is simply carving a series of islands into the space and then developing the buildings like a series of smaller versions of same with in it in other words the vocabularies constantly based on those circles or ellipses and so on so the notion of the the concept form is some things that you could call in a mathematics a parameter in other words you use it to get to the solution but you don't have to keep it afterwards or you keep it but it's entirely transformed such as this building that we completed last year for Museum in burgundy a small sort of interpretation center where sewer 360 view was needed to see all the hills it celebrates the battle between a Julius Caesar and the Gauls two thousand years ago and does it in a absolutely beautiful landscape practically untouched so the the idea was to try to have again Now Playing concept material and and and and and and the the sexual 360 degrees movement vector but doing it in there are two buildings that are about half a mile apart one is the museum the other one is the interpretation center one is made of wood the other one is made of stone and we have certain conceptual characteristic that are in common others are different and here once again you test that materiality the the two plans here leave that some aerial views of the first one which has been completed a few months ago the and so called a Center for interpretation with that double envelope the double envelope is made at wood and also as an attempt to make it literally disappear in the landscape it absorbs the light the the outer envelope is made of those major pieces of wood while the inner envelope is made of black concrete or black glass as you can see here certain views about how the two materials reinforce one another and the interior is entirely made of concrete the opposite game of having that last ramps glass circulation in the word factory here it's all poured-in-place concrete and some of the other views here and eventually if you ask about yourself about form you can't resist to say film let's do it formless currently and the completion the zoo the Paris zoo just east of Paris about 25 acres and you say what about having a form that has no form and we architects I hope all of you are fascinated by doing non human architecture architecture for you know giraffes and hippos and things of this sort there are some fantastic precedents right you bet kin with the penguins but when you when we talked about that that the zookeeper said oh it was terrible the Penguins hated them we all you have of course extraordinary Cedric aviary with Lord Snowdon here in London or a little-known absolutely wonderful project by John hey Doc it's his massive thesis it's a houses for animals for the elephant for the snake for the monkeys so these are your precedents but of course you cannot use them you are somewhere else you in another time and you decide to not to make architecture with the the landscape as its background but to make the landscape with architecture as his background turn it the other way around so the cages for humans and for animals in the same way the entrance area is like an aviary the the each of the little aviaries are either for architects for architects yes sure for for visitors or for monkeys and love green house by the way mostly done with incredibly low budget with with good the general contractor and then all the architecture is really about that non form form that formlessness the zoo is something they technical you have to deal with major safety issues you have to deal with major it's like doing the hospital circles and spectacle at the same time and and so the building of a quite technical but behind in front of them is again using the word as that's formless thing and this is a year well yes exactly a year from now I think you will have the ability to go and discover it yourself so it's all that once again it's all about architecture is not a form but it's about ideas and concept and philosophers have made an interesting distinction between the word concept calm context account concept percept and effect now concept we talked about it percept is about perceptions it's about what you see and effect it's about emotion and experience very much in the last 10 15 years everybody's been talking only about perceptions and a little bit about emotions and about sensations but very little about the concept and so here is that discussion that architecture cannot exist without the three terms and so I'll read it again architecture invent concept and materializes them by turning them into physical spaces and constructive material it is distinguished from other field by the languages uses concrete and glass space and light movement and programs opposed to word and sentences numbers and equations melody and rhythm and so on but distinguish a concept in architecture from a concept in philosophy is its implied materiality so I could go on give you further example but I think I take questions thanks so much let me just open the floor right now and as people are settling having seen you present in many different settings and presenting your own work alongside some of the research of course the striking thing is how you're speaking particularly in second person in this book and and I suppose that begs a question that maybe to open up this conversation would have to do with the relationship of your work in the studio to the making of this book versus other books that have been an incredibly important part of the project for many years it seems to be a very different kind of book if for no other reason you're speaking about the work in a different tense the pronoun itself you isn't the you out here the you is you in the studio and I'm just wondering if you could say something about what the production of this book was actually like compared to event city's transcripts and other texts all the other books first of all they every book tried to avoid the monograph I would say the monograph is the death of architectural thinking right so but the other thing that you mentioned say the the first book architecture in this junction with a series of texts some written while being here be a trying to and indeed they sorted out two biographical thought of it but disguised in a way many of the texts were written at the time when I was trying I was trying to get away from being caught within the again the dictionary received ideas of architecture so those texts were trying to understand certain things based on certain readings and so on but at one moment the text could not go any further so you had to they were put together in the book a lot affection this Junction which each of the texts the text used to be articles in various magazines and then when I would write an article I would write the next article with the like the following chapter previous one so it was very self-conscious using the deadline of the article you know that to get the chapters of the book writes because I couldn't ever have done it otherwise so so that was a fairly straightforward mechanism because it was an exploration without necessarily having done the work ahead of time the second the events it is availab in office and you produce a lot of stuff competitions and so on and you can't bear the idea of having an archive and you think the only way for me to find the stuff is if we do books in which we put it in right so the whole event City series of which there are four and the fifth one in the making is a lazy way to not to have a proper archive by now we've hired an archive person and now we sort of have the thing which all right but for a long time and still now you know I'm so much faster to go into the one of them and look at it all pointed out so the the event cities are a way simply to hear your earth complete as you're doing it but out of sheer laziness the interesting thing however is that you want to give a theme to each of those event cities and retro actively you we conceive what you have already conceived amusingly enough the five five of the five parts which are which I just showed you forever coincide with the full event cities right so it means that you you discover is the retro actively while you're doing you know at best a correlation between certain themes you interested in so now let's get to the this particular book 776 pages 1500 words 59 59 images about 70 thousand words or whatever you talk about you know six years to do it you can add one year in you know just in introduction in China and this sort of thing the the point was to try to develop an argument and amusingly enough if the intuition about the the issue of the idea and contact and concept was there from the beginning the text that sort of ranted up is done at the very end once the book is done then you say hey that was what it was all about so the the point is and amusingly enough now we're both in the you know he's he runs this place fantastically well by the way I ran I thought I they influenced by da once upon a time I ran the school at Columbia when I asked a faculty member to describe what they are doing I always asked what they intend to the agenda what is there what do they want ever to be remembered for right that's exactly the question to answer so in short if I was to encapsulate an agenda an argument what would be that meta argument and the book was in a sense not one even though they lot of project about you know us that we've done in various thing in the office and so on it's really a project awaits a project yes a project about architecture it's a book about architecture asking questions about architecture in other words it shouldn't that's why it's not a monograph that song it's not about simply glossing over glossy images it's really asking what architecture is what are the foundations what are when I see you cannot avoid well contact concept and content oh you cannot avoid having vectors an envelope or you cannot avoid having space event and movement is a way to ask the question when you are doing a project how does it fit within the general issue of what architecture is the thing that has always fascinated me about architecture as opposed to many other human activity it's never fully defined that's why I think that 2,000 years from now it'll be still we still exist it's probably one of the richest human activity that because high very interesting lecture I don't know if I understand what you mean by concept and I was wondering if that had to do with the idea of intention with the idea of commitment or with the idea of communication sometimes any of these three but I'm going to give you maybe several examples right the the most basic one is one that we architects use a lot right which is say when local busy a invents what is called the plan lead on the fact that you have a structural grid but that the actual partition can be in any possible direction independently from the structure it is a concept the plaintiff is a concept when say Lucan uses a distinction between servants spaces and serving in served soft spaces it makes a distinction between two type of spaces and organizes buildings or even cities in that manner this is a concept now those are general concept some of them are still valid today you can see traces of I mean some number of projects if I look you know way to tell you it or a sauna project I will recognize certain you know presence and then you have some what I would call fundamental concepts which really without which the discipline could could not exist here use an analogy if you are into psychoanalysis there is no way to deal with psychoanalysis without the concept of the unconscious or the concept of transfer in other words if you take that concept out of psychoanalysis you don't have psychoanalysis anymore right so you could ask yourself what are you know the concept of architecture I'm letting this question open because that's the whole point of this lecture is that I want you to think about it first of all thank you for a lecture so you set up set of questions but you've answered most of them so my question to you this will be funny was the next question you asked yourself I'm not sure if I fully heard the whole question you said that I censored most of them yes no no no far from it I would be desperate if I had right or in have an immolation answer life life would be really dry no I think the the intent is to ask the questions and to provide one possible answer namely there is never one single answer to any of these questions however asking the questions is sometimes quite important right that was my question was the next question what is the next question you ask yourself well I know what the next you know I'll tell you the the subtitle of the the next even cities right is concept and material which I talked a little bit about but with project that I haven't shown you today right I'll give you another example we're doing in in all these except when I showed this example of the the Renaissance Sun I've never used the word facade to my mind I have never designed a facade so I thought in this day now now that I've done this big book right now maybe I'm ready to design a facade and to look at all sometimes Red Crescent so we're doing a project in Italy and I thought let's take two of the archetypes of Renaissance architecture the facade the first chapter and the cocktailing so the whole project is about fine facade you know four five that are really plain and that have to deal with the issue of transformation you know facade is really how you make all's right in the world oh how you replace it so so you ask yourself yeah what is the question that I still have not asked myself and every new project is an excuse either to revisit a question or to to invent a new question that's probably the reason why and just now between some of us here why I always like teaching because teaching was a very good excuse to ask questions to your students semester around it and discuss those so yeah that's that's how you do it but what is what the the point that I wanted to add it means that you always work with a critical distance the word critical is very unpopular these days after the well it's not used at all it's not even you know it's the post critical is gone there is no more that we are the post post critical so but to have a data the distance in a relationship to what you are doing yourself right do it securely in the back thank you very much

Channel: AA School of Architecture

Views: 10,114

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Keywords: Architectural Association, Public Programme, 2013, Red is Not a Color, Bernard Tschumi

Id: E9nVkuWarY8

Length: 87min 30sec (5250 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 01 2015