The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Bernard Tschumi
that comes occasionally in different manners. In the student center currently
under construction here at Columbia University, which I have just designed,
we were also confronted with a great variety of different activities.
WM: There were many different conditions and spaces inside and outside
the campus.
BT: Yes. The location was difficult, and here we get into New York particularities.
Europeans are much more relaxed about their history than Americans.
You can go to Italy and see how Scarpa acted in the ruins of a castello.
He put the most sophisticated modern glass and technologies inside extraordinary
Renaissance palaces, combining the two with a great finesse. New
York conservationists would be unbelievably upset if we ever tried to do that.
If they have an old stone they want to put another old stone next to it. In the
case of the Columbia scheme, there was also a master plan by McKim,
Mead, and White that was very interesting, and which we decided to celebrate
rather than go against. But I tried to use that tactic of judo where you
use the opponent’s strength against him. There are two characteristics of the
master plan: between the two blocks that were suggested for the building
site there is a void, and that void was the place of what I call “event.” The
two blocks had very different sides: one faced Broadway and the other faced
inside the walled campus. This could have been a problem, because the campus
is half a story higher than Broadway. It became very tempting to bring
ramps and simply connect the two wings, instead of having staggered horizontal
layers where you have a dynamic continuity between them. So all the
activities were placed in the more generic block or wing, so that they would
charge the space in between, making it not a residual space, but a highly
defined space. The notion I suggest is that the architect’s role, quoting
Deleuze, is “actualizing potentialities,” which I find extremely interesting—
in other words, taking circumstances, but turning them into something altogether
different.
But the more general point that interests me is that architecture is
always defined as the materialization of a concept. So the questions are first
of all, what is the concept, how do you derive it, and how do you actualize its
potentialities? But then concepts themselves have moments which are more
acute, more crucial, in any given circumstance. So generally it is the more
acute places where I try to bring technological invention, probably based on
the notion that our cities and our architecture have taken great leaps forward
when there have been new technological developments: the department
store in the nineteenth century, the railway station, the invention of the elevator,
etc. Hence, in many of our projects we have been trying to push the