The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Bernard Tschumi
BT: Well, we were given a choice of three or four. We chose the roundabout
because it was a nowhere site. Amusingly enough, we understood how the
space worked and then we developed a pavilion, and went back to the city
giving them alternative implementations on the site and said “Put it where
you want.” They selected this implementation as the most appropriate one.
But to go back to your original point, “How do you actualize the potentialities
of a site or building?” The program was to design a temporary pavilion
for a video and music festival. It occurred to me that somehow the preconception
that a video is something private that you watch in your living room
with a VCR was not necessarily the way to go about the design for this
gallery: it should have a public nature to it that could be realized. We considered
a reversal and said “No: the videos will be in the open. They will be
visible and people will watch them together”—and so we turned the thing
around to make it a completely glass pavilion, as opposed to a box.
I was also interested in the relation between the body and the perception
that you would walk through it and see each of those monitors. So
there was something that could be done by simply shifting your balance as
you walked. We lifted the building, and tilted it sideways, so that again your
relation to the images would not be quite the normal one. We provided a situation
where the viewer had a dynamic relationship to the videos. The gallery
was glass, a technological invention that was not much of an invention; but
we decided we were not going to use columns or steel, we were just going to
use glass. If you remove the glass you have nothing left, just a slab and a
structure. This meant then that the relationship between the envelope and
what was happening inside became completely challenged by the fact that
you would have endless reflections; at night it became unbelievably strange.
The slight imbalance, or lack of balance, of the oblique structure as you
walked, and then the video monitors endlessly reflecting against the columns
and beams of glass, meant that your sense of space was constantly challenged.
Its role in the city was extraordinary, because while it was being used,
suddenly you had bizarre things, with the images dancing endlessly, and people
floating in midair. Amazingly, the city decided it liked the gallery and
wanted to keep it, and it became a permanent fixture, which is still used at
regular intervals. They have now suggested that it could become part of various
museum structures.
WM: You have also said that an architect can take what exists, fill in the
gaps, complete the text, and scribble as it were in the margins, producing a
complement to what is already there.
BT: This we can do occasionally, but again I would place it more in a continuity
approach. But you can scribble like the Italians and their palazzi.