The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Architecture and the City
WM: You also claim that you can search for an intermediary and abstract
system.
BT: Yes, that is La Villette, where the mediator is the folie.
WM: How do you feel about La Villette after all these years, and how it has
been treated by the public?
BT: Well first it was a major effort, because it took twelve years to complete,
under five different governments, from different regions. At the time people
said I would only build two or three folies, but I didn’t realize that they were
right, that there was not a chance in the world. Then something fantastic occurred.
The general public started to come to La Villette more and more.
They did not stand around and block the project. The building was conceived
more as an activator, made through the permutation of different parts, but
the considerations were not part of architectural culture; they were much
more part of culture in general. The intent was that by superimposition of
movement and folies and so on, one was trying to create an incredible social
thing, which it was and still is: the park receives 8 million visitors a year. But
what is stunning and fascinating to me (this will never happen to any other
building I design) is the difference between visiting the park on a Monday
morning in November or a Sunday afternoon in July, when you have totally
different perceptions. The folies become a mirror for your fantasies, but you
find that the mirror is always throwing you different images, at different
times, whether you are on your own on a foggy Monday morning, or you are
surrounded by 25,000 people. So the park has been an incredible popular
success, to the point where I am concerned as to whether it will survive the
wear and tear.
WM: Has it gentrified the area?
BT: Oh, yes, of course! I think that was a part of the plot of the politicians
who commissioned it.
WM: It seemed to be one of the strengths of the park when I first visited it
that it was actually placed in a working-class neighborhood, or at least not
in the center of Paris.
BT: Yes, the direct vicinity, and the French social impulse that it would have
housing surrounding it that would be for different economic levels, means
you have different buildings—and the housing blocks are not bad.
WM: You brought other people into the garden project?
BT: At the time there was an enormous resentment from the landscape architecture
profession against an architect doing the largest park since the