The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture and the City
tions between parts that nobody has thought about. And hence my interest
in a program which extended the idea of the event and which is very strong
in our last two or three buildings, where I feel much more like a person who
has designed conditions for an event to take place, rather than someone who
conditions the design or does packaging. I am not interested in packaging.
WM: Does any of this come from living in New York, where nothing ever
seems to get built, where architects never get to do an urban project but only
renovations—somehow only being able to make smaller decisions in the urban
fabric?
BT: I would have a hard time responding to this question, because I have
been here for such a long time that I am sure that there are certain things,
or awarenesses, that you develop because of the place of your residence. If
I think of the Parc de la Villette in Paris, that was a sort of tabula rasa project,
although there were a number of things that already existed on that site.
By choosing the smallest common denominator, the red cube, for example,
that was a way to be able to insert oneself within the other huge structures—
industrial slaughterhouses, canal, and urban highway. The smallest common
denominator was such that it could suddenly be unbelievably strong by the
sheer strength of repetition: because it is such a different site whether you
come in from the museum, or the other side, or come in from the hotel site,
etc. Yes, each has different scales, different perceptions. And that was a particularly
conscious structure—lines of movement, paths and covered galleries,
and so on. The point was that one was setting conditions for a variety
of uses and especially something that I find extremely important with the
work, namely the possible appropriation of the work by others. I am interested
in the old Situationist word détournement, which is a form of disruption,
subversion. I am not as interested in operating the détournement as in
operating the condition of the détournement.
WM: Are any of the buildings that came after your follies, like the public
housing at La Villette, Paris, in the spirit of détournement?
BT: No, that is another story. The slaughterhouse refit, and the public housing,
and the transformation into the City of Science came before I arrived.
Everything else came after; things like the rock concert arena or the City of
Music building were very much a part of my role as master planner for that
whole area. The housing out there was a political gesture. Within the Socialist
government of the time there were unbelievable tensions between different
factions: the cultural faction, the hard-core social faction, and the social
housing faction, who had set 10,000 housing units at La Villette, which were
of course just multiplied by the square footage, which meant there would be