The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space

Part III: Tactics
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Bernard Tschumi
nineteenth century. The competition was originally for both architects and
landscape architects, but suddenly an architect was in charge, and this enraged
the landscape profession. I am still perceived by the landscape architects
as a wolf. The park, for me, was a part of the city and it was very much
a cultural construct. It was not building nature: on the contrary, within the
cultural construct, I had thought about doing the so-called cinematic promenade,
which was a promenade of gardens. The gardens would be placed in
sequence, and then we started to invite landscape architects to do some of
those gardens, but with a twist. We decided not to leave them alone but to
have them work with artists, poets, philosophers, etc. The first one was the
bamboo garden with Alexandre Chemetoff and Daniel Buren.
WM: Buren contributed stripes?
BT: You guessed it; but they are very subtle, in black and beige pebbles, and
then the stripes continue into the concrete, the concrete shifts, and the
stripes change. It is the most successful collaboration in the park. I had also
the idea of inviting for that garden the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard,
but Lyotard was finishing another project at the Centre Pompidou and could
not participate. At this same time I was preparing the next sequence at La
Villette, and for this sequence I wanted the intervention to comment about
deconstruction. So having the advantage of being the master planner, I
thought “Let’s put Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida together and see
what happens.” But as I often say, great love affairs do not have to end up in
procreation. The garden was never built, but it was an interesting collaboration.
WM: You seem to be talking in a pedagogical way: understanding the problems,
and trying to not just deal with problems but to figure out ways to
teach people about architectural culture in your projects.
BT: I would say I do not try to teach but to set the conditions, where people
are going to learn because of those conditions that you have set forth.
WM: Do you think of yourself as a planner?
BT: Oh, yes. It’s a pity that the word planner is so discredited today—even, it
seems, among planners. Today most planners are not even planners, they are
bureaucrats. These design methodologies I suggest are not unlike what I do
at Columbia’s architecture school, where by analogy I believe the school is
like a city. It functions best when there are slight contradictions, conflicts,
and nodes of irritation that are actually dynamic, and this condition produces
new ideas. So I see my role as setting those things in motion. Generally, you