Bernard Tschumi

Notations
Diagrams & Sequences
Contents

6 Preface

Notations

8 The Manhattan Transcripts, New York, NY, USA, 1977

16 Sequential House, Princeton, NJ, USA, 1981

20 Parc de la Villette, Paris, France, 1982

38 Le Fresnoy National Studio for Contemporary Arts, Tourcoing, France, 1991

46 Opera House, Tokyo, Japan, Competition 1986

50 National Library of France, Paris, France, Competition 1989

56 Chartres Business Park, Chartres, France, Competition 1991

60 School of Architecture, Paris/Marne-la-Valle, France, 1994

68 Alfred J. Lerner Hall Student Center, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA, 1994

74 Museum of Modern Art, Extension, New York, NY, USA, Competition 1997

84 Rouen Concert Hall and Exhibition Complex, Rouen, France, 1998

Limoges Concert Hall, Limoges, France, 2003

88 School of Architecture, Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA 1999

96 Italian Space Agency, Rome, Italy, Competition 2000

102 Museum for African Art, New York, NY, USA, Competition 2000

110 Museum for African Art and Residential Tower, New York, NY, USA, 2003

116 Carnegie Science Center Extension, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, Competition 2000

122 Ponte Parodi, Genoa, Italy, 2000

124 The Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece, 2001

136 Electronic Media and Performing Arts Center, Troy, NY, USA, Competition 2001
144 Vacheron Constantin Headquarters and Manufacturing Center, Phase 1, Geneva, Switzerland, 2001

152 Vacheron Constantin Headquarters and Manufacturing Center, Phase 2, Geneva, Switzerland, 2011

162 Museum of Contemporary Art, So Paulo, Brazil, Competition 2001

168 Tri-Towers of Babel, New York, NY, USA, 2002

172 Richard E. Lindner Athletics Center, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA, 2001

184 Alsia Musoparc, Alsia, France, 2002

198 M2 Metro Station, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2003

204 Factory 798, Beijing, China, 2003

212 BLUE Residential Tower, New York, NY, USA, 2004

218 Dubai Opera House, Dubai, U.A.E., Competition 2005

226 Independent Financial Centre of the Americas Master Plan, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 2005

232 Bordeaux-Cenon Cultural Center, Bordeaux, France, 2005

236 Ecole Cantonale dArt de Lausanne (ECAL), Lausanne/Renens, Switzerland, 2005

240 Pedestrian Bridge, La Roche-sur-Yon, France, 2007

242 MegaHall Montpellier, Montpellier, France, Competition 2007

244 Student Center, University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, Texas, USA, 2008

250 Mediapolis, Singapore, 2008

254 Zoo de Vincennes, Paris, France, 2008

260 Carnal Dome, Le Rosey International School, Rolle, Switzerland, 2009

266 EDF Project Saclay, Paris, France, Competition 2010

270 OCT-LOFT Master Plan and Museum, Shenzhen, China, 2011

274 City of Music CIMU, Ile Seguin, Paris, France, Competition 2012

286 ANIMA, Grottammare, Italy, 2012

Preface
I only use the word notation, never sketch.
My notations are quick abstractions, diagrams
drawn by hand in order toexpress a concept, and
often the very essence ofaproject.
I almost never draw on a table. Maybe at the
office, when discussing projects, I might do a
rough notation to clarify a point or sum up a set
of alternatives.
Most of the time, however, I draw on my knee,
in a taxi or a subway. Even in planes, I prefer
putting the paper on my lap, using a magazine as
a simple support. The unevenness of the support
makes thought the priority; it avoids aesthetic
inclinations.
For me, drawing is thinking. I am bored on vaca-
tion unless I am working, even by a pool. But,
being with a piece of paper and a pen doesnt
feel like work. It can be sheer bliss to see thought
materialize itself in front of your eyes through the
almost unconscious mediation of your hand.
It is a form of notating the minds activity.
Notation is not sketching, and its products are
not sketches. I avoid the word sketch, detest
the French equivalent, croquis. The words reek
of Beaux-Arts esthetizing ideology. Sketch
suggests something that will be followed by a
more elaborate version of the same, and then
by schematic drawings, design development
drawings and, likely, many forms of conventional
representation. What I am doing here is thoughts
on paper. The current state of technology still
requires the hand. But I could imagine using
emerging technologies or the movement of my
eyes alone, providing thought could somehow
materialize itself infront of the eyes.
An example: While working on the La Villette
competition, Ibroke a bone in my right hand.
My hand was so swollen that I had to draw with
my left hand for a couple of days. It was slower
and definitely clumsier, but the content was the
same. So notation doesnt depend on how well
you draw, or how beautiful the product is. Indeed,
drawing too well may be an impediment, resulting
in prettification. An architectural notation is not
about being pretty or beautiful. It is about using
the smallest number or amount of lines in order
to express what you are thinking. At this stage, it
is only about thought, ideas, or concepts.
So, these notations never have an aesthetic
purpose when they are made. They are about
thought, quick thought (which takes a few
seconds) or slow-process thought. The paper
is always the same American 8 x 11 format
rather than the Germanic A4, and is cheap,
coarse, and bought in bulk. For years my pen has
been a Uniball Onyx (75 for ten). I generally finish
the drawing by writing the date and location on
one corner. The date is occasionally written the
American way, with the month first, which can
create confusion with my more typical European
day first, month second manner. The dates listed
for the projects in this volume indicate the begin-
ning of design. The paper is laid vertically or hori-
zontally, depending on the project I am working
on or how much room there is for my elbow when
Im in a plane. For some of the drawings repre-
sented here, the original has been lostall that
remains is a fax or a photocopy. This mechanical
reproduction accounts for the varying thick-
nesses of lines on some of the pages inthisbook.
The notations on these pages began with the
very first drawings I made during my first year
in New York in the mid-70s, after an interrup-
tion of almost six years. My goal then was to
try to apprehend architecture in a different
way, removed from the conventions perfected
over generations or even centuries. My starting
point was the idea that architecture is both
space and event, and there is no space without
something that happens in it. I considered the
plans, sections, and perspectives of traditional
architectural representation inadequate to
represent the relationship between space and
event (or movement). The first drawings from
this New York period aimed at developing new
modes of description of a space that is simul-
taneously conceptual and dynamic. The draw-
ings for Joyces Garden, the Screenplays or The
Manhattan Transcripts involved such exploration.
With the project for the Parc de la Villette, an
additional dimension needed to be added: the
drawings had to evolve so that the concepts they
described could lead to their materialization in a
work that could bebuilt.
6
Several types can be distinguished among the
drawings published here. Sometimes the type
consists of an abstract notation that is highly
conceptual, as in several of the early projects,
like the Tokyo Opera House, to one cite example.
In other cases, the diagrams are halfway between
abstraction and the volumetric expression of the
different components of a project, as in the many
exploded axonometrics. Sometimes the drawings
veer close to architectural sketches as produced
over decades or even centuries (schematic plans,
sections, or perspectives, etc). Whatever the
type of notation, some drawings will appear dry,
others basic, and some, even beautiful. What
is important is that they represent a mode of
thought, a thinking or conceptual tool, and rarely
a formal or esthetic device.
In some cases, half a dozen pages culled from
the several thousands of worksheets covering
about one hundred projects were sufficient
to define the main concepts of theprojects
and the possibilities of their materialization.
In others, several pages per day for several
weeks document the intensity of research or the
complexity of a site orprogram until the concept
emerges and becomes refined. The selection
for this collection of more than 300 drawings is
not intended to celebrate the fetishism often
attached to the architectural sketch, but rather
to demonstrate the conceptual sequence that
makes up the architectural project. The book is
subtitled Diagrams and Sequences, because no
drawing exists independently, on its own. Each
7
is a part of a chain in which each link is preceded
by an incomplete idea and followed by a more
elaborate conceptualization. The book describes
a temporal process rather than isolated esthetic
forms. It is a means and neveranend.
Inevitably, such a collection of drawings will
appear off-balance, for the simple reason that
the drawings are accompanied by parallel labor
by a team of coworkers who will interpret the
diagrams and notations so as to turn them into
scaled plans and sections. The hand drawings
often respond to this precious information by
reframing it. Sometimes the precision of a scaled
plan will demonstrate that the abstract concept
proposed in the hand-drawn notation was in
error; if so, everything will re-start from scratch.
This isnt a problem; the rejected concept often
re-emerges in a more calibrated variant in a
subsequent project. The reader can check docu-
mentation in the Event-Cities series or Architec-
ture Concepts: Red Is Not a Color to understand
the context in which the drawings were developed
and view the built work to which these early nota-
tions attest.
The language of the comments that amplify these
notations is either English or French, without
preference, and generally selected almost
unconsciously according to the project, the place
of work, and the recipients of the drawings in my
New York or Paris offices.
Bernard Tschumi, 2014
Museum of Modern Art Extension, New York, NY, USA, Competition 1997

74
City of voids: Within a solid mass made of undifferenti-
ated floors, a number of voids are cut and become major
indoor or outdoor spaces.

75
Museum of Modern Art Extension, New York, NY, USA, Competition 1997

The voids carved into the mass of the buildings act as

sequences. Their structure resembles a gridded sponge
ora chessboard for a game of exhibition galleries.

76
77
Museum of Modern Art Extension, New York, NY, USA, Competition 1997

Modes of distribution of voids. Right: A project conceived

as a game. Architects supply the board and the pieces; the
curators determine the rules and play the game. Thevoids
can be distinguished from the flows that intersect them.

78
79
 point de FolieMaintenant larchitecture
Jacques Derrida (1986)
1 a stranger to history, of course, but the relation would be differ-
Maintenant,1 this French word, will not be translated. Why? For
reasons, a whole series of reasons, which may appear along the
way, or even at the end of the road. For here I am undertaking
one road or, rather, one course among other possible and con-
current ones: a series of cursive notations through the folies of
Bernard Tschumi, from point to point, and hazardous, discontin-
uous, aleatory.
Why maintenant? I put away or place in reserve, I set aside the
reason to maintain the seal or stamp of this idiom: it would recall
the Parc de la Villette in France, and that a pretext gave rise to
these Folies. Only a pretext, no doubt, along the waya station,
phase, or pause in a trajectory. Nevertheless, the pretext was
114 offered in France. In French we say that a chance is offered but
also, do not forget, to offer a resistance.
Maintenant, the word will not flutter like the banner of the
moment, it will not introduce burning questions: What about
architecture today? What are we to think about the current state
of architecture? What is new in this domain? For architecture no
longer defines a domain. Maintenant: neither a modernist signal
nor even a salute to post-modernity. The post-s and posters
which proliferate today (poststructuralism, postmodernism,
etc.) still surrender to the historicist urge. Everything marks an
era, even the decentering of the subject: posthumanism. It is as
if one again wished to put a linear succession in order, to peri-
odise, to distinguish between before and after, to limit the risks
of reversibility or repetition, transformation or permutation: an
ideology of progress.
History/overview
3 arrive at meaning, but of what happens to it, to meaning, to the
points
Maintenant: if the word still designates what happens, has just
happened, promises to happen to architecture as well as through
architecture, this imminence of the just (just happens, just hap-
pened, is just about to happen) no longer lets itself be inscribed
in the ordered sequence of a history: it is neither a fashion, a
period or an era. The just maintenant [just now] does not remain
ent. And if this happens to us, we must be prepared to receive
these two words. On the one hand, it does not happen to a
constituted us, to a human subjectivity whose essence would
be arrested and which would then find itself affected by the
history of this thing called architecture. We appear to ourselves
only through an experience of spacing which is already marked
by architecture. What happens through architecture both con-
structs and instructs this us. The latter finds itself engaged by
architecture before it becomes the subject of it: master and
possessor. On the other hand, the imminence of what happens
to us maintenant announces not only an architectural event
but, more particularly, a writing of space, a mode of spacing
which makes a place for the event. If Tschumis work indeed
describes an architecture of the event, it is not only in that it
constructs places in which something should happen or to make 115
the construction itself be, as we say, an event. This is not what
is essential. The dimension of the event is subsumed in the very
structure of the architectural apparatus: sequence, open series,
narrativity, the cinematic, dramaturgy, choreography.
4
Is an architecture of events possible? If what happens to us thus
does not come from outside, or rather, if this outside engages
us in the very thing we are, is there a maintenant of architecture
and in what sense [sens]? Everything indeed [justement] comes
down to the question of meaning [sens]. We shall not reply by
indicating a means of access, for example, through a given form
of architecture: preamble, pronaos, threshold, methodical route,
circle or circulation, labyrinth, flight of stairs, ascent, archaeo-
logical regression towards a foundation, etc. Even less through
the form of a system, that is, through architectonics: the art of
systems, as Kant says. We will not reply by giving access to
some final meaning, whose assumption would be finally prom-
ised us. No, it is justly [justement] a question of what happens
to meaning: not in the sense of what would finally allow us to
meaning of meaning. And soand this is the eventwhat hap-
points
pens to it through an event which, no longer precisely or simply
falling into the domain of meaning, would be intimately linked to
something like madness [Ia folie].
 5 7
Not madness [Ia Folie], the allegorical hypostasis of Unrea-
son, non-sense, but the madnesses [les folies]. We will have
to account with this plural. The folies, then, Bernard Tschumis
folies. Henceforth we will speak of them through metonymy and
in a metonymically metonymic manner since, as we will see,
this figure carries itself away; it has no means within itself to
stop itself, any more than the number of Folies in the Parc de la
Villette. Folies: it is first of all the name, a proper name in a way,
and a signature. Tschumi names in this manner the point-grid
which distributes a non-finite number of elements in a space
which it in fact spaces but does not fill. Metonymy, then, since
folies, at first, designates only a part, a series of parts, precisely
the pinpoint weave of an ensemble which also includes lines
and surfaces, a sound-track and an image-track. We will square, sepulchre. It goes right through us [nous transit] to the
return to the function assigned to this multiplicity of red points.
Here, let us note only that it maintains a metonymic relation to
the whole of the Parc. Through this proper name, in fact, the
folies are a common denominator, the largest common denom-
inator of this programmatic deconstruction. But, in addition,
the red point of each folie remains divisible in turn, a point with-
out a point, offered up in its articulated structure to substitutions
or combinatory permutations which relate it to other folies as
much as to its own parts. Open point and closed point. This
116 double metonymy becomes abyssal when it determines or over-
determines what opens this proper name (the Folies of Ber-
nard Tschumi) to the vast semantics of the concept of madness,
the great name or common denominator of all that happens to
meaning when it leaves itself, alienates and dissociates itself
without ever having been subject, exposes itself to the outside
and spaces itself out in what is not itself: not the semantics but,
first of all, the asemantics of Folies.
6 structure and syntax, the form and function of architecture. It
The folies, then, these folies in every sensefor once we can
say that they are not on the road to ruin, the ruin of defeat or
nostalgia. They do not amount to the absence of the work tectural topic of this semanticism from which, inevitably, four
that fate of madness in the classical period of which Foucault
speaks. Instead, they make up a work, they put into operation.
How? How can we think that the work can possibly maintain
itself in this madness? How can we think the maintenant of the
architectural work? Through a certain adventure of the point,
were coming to it, maintenant the workmaintenant is the
pointthis very instant, the point of its implosion. The folies
put into operation a general dislocation; they draw into it every-
thing that, until maintenant, seems to have given architecture
meaning. More precisely, everything that seems to have given
points
architecture over to meaning. They deconstruct first of all, but
not only, the semantics of architecture.
Let us never forget that there is an architecture of architecture.
Down even to its archaic foundation, the most fundamental
concept of architecture has been constructed. This naturalised
architecture is bequeathed to us: we inhabit it, it inhabits us, we
think it is destined for habitation, and it is no longer an object
for us at all. But we must recognise in it an artefact, a construc-
tion, a monument. It did not fall from the sky; it is not natural,
even if it informs a specific scheme of relations to physis, the
sky, the earth, the human and the divine. This architecture of
architecture has a history; it is historical through and through.
Its heritage inaugurates the intimacy of our economy, the law of
our hearth (oikos), our familial, religious and political oikonomy,
all the places of birth and death, temple, school, stadium, agora,
point that we forget its very historicity: we take it for nature. It
is common sense itself.
8
The concept of architecture is itself an inhabited constructum,
a heritage which comprehends us even before we could sub- 117
mit it to thought. Certain invariables remain, constant, through
all the mutations of architecture. Impassible, imperturbable, an
axiomatic traverses the whole history of architecture. An axiom-
atic, that is to say, an organised ensemble of fundamental and
always presupposed evaluations. This hierarchy has fixed itself
in stone; henceforth, it informs the entirety of social space.
What are these invariables? I will distinguish four, the slightly
artificial charter of four traits, let us say, rather, of four points.
They translate one and the same postulation: architecture must
have a meaning, it must present it and, through it, signify. The
signifying or symbolical value of this meaning must direct the
must direct it from outside, according to a principle (arch), a
fundamental or foundation, a transcendence or finality (telos)
whose locations are not themselves architectural. The anarchi-
points of invariance derive:
The experience of meaning must be dwelling, the law of oikos,
the economy of men or gods. In its nonrepresentational pres-
ence which (as distinct from the other arts) seems to refer only
to itself, the architectural work seems to have been destined
for the presence of men and gods. The arrangement, occupa-
tion and investment of locations must be measured against this
economy. Heidegger still alludes to it when he interprets home-
lessness (Heimatlosigkeit) as the symptom of onto-theology
points
and, more precisely, of modern technology. Behind the hous-
ing crisis he encourages us to reflect properly on the real dis-
 tress, poverty and destitution of dwelling itself (die eigentliche
Not des Wohnens). Mortals must first learn to dwell (sie das
Wohnen erst lernen mssen), listen to what calls them to dwell.
This is not a deconstruction, but rather a call to repeat the very
fundamentals of the architecture that we inhabit, that we should
learn again how to inhabit, the origin of its meaning. Of course,
if the folies think through and dislocate this origin, they should
not give in either to the jubilation of modern technology or to
the maniacal mastery of its powers. That would be a new turn
in the same metaphysics. Hence the difficulty of what justly
maintenantarises.
Centered and hierarchised, the architectural organisation had
to fall in line with the anamnesis of the origin and the seating of
the foundation. Not only from the time of its foundation on the
ground of the earth but also since its juridico-political founda-
tion, the institution which commemorates the myths of the city,
heroes or founding gods. Despite appearances, this religious
or political memory, this historicism, has not deserted architec-
ture. Modern architecture retains nostalgia for it: it is its destiny
to be a guardian. An always-hierarchising nostalgia: architec-
ture will materialise the hierarchy in stone or wood (hyl); it is
a hyletics of the sacred (hieros) and the principle (arch), an
archi-hieratics.
This economy remains, of necessity, a telology of dwelling. It
subscribes to all the rules of finality. Ethico-political finality, reli-
gious duty, utilitarian or functional ends: it is always a question
of putting architecture in service, and at service. This end is the
118 principle of the archi-hieratical order.
Regardless of mode, period or dominant style, this order ulti-
mately depends on the fine arts. The value of beauty, harmony,
and totality still reigns.
These four points of invariability do not adjoin. They delineate
the chart of a system from the angles of a frame. We will not say
only that they come together and remain inseparable, which is
true. They give rise to a specific experience of assembling, that
of the coherent totality and continuity of the system. Thus, they
determine a network of evaluations; they induce and inform,
even if indirectly, all the theory and criticism of architecture,
from the most specialised to the most trivial. Such evaluation
inscribes the hierarchy in a hyletics, as well as in the space of
a formal distribution of values. But this architectonics of invari-
able points also regulates all of what is called Western culture,
far beyond its architecture. Hence the contradiction, the double
bind or antinomy which at once animates and disturbs this his-
tory. On the one hand, this general architectonics effaces or
exceeds the sharp specificity of architecture; it is valid for other
arts and regions of experience as well. On the other hand, archi-
tecture forms its most powerful metonymy; it gives it its most
solid consistency, objective substance. By consistency, I do not
mean only logical coherence, which implicates all dimensions
of human experience in the same network: there is no work of
architecture without interpretation, or even economic, religious,
points
political, aesthetic, or philosophical decree. But by consistency
also mean duration, hardness, the monumental, mineral or lig-
neous subsistence, the hyletics of tradition. Hence the resis-
tance: the resistance of materials as much as of conscious-
nesses and unconsciousness which instate this architecture as
the last fortress of metaphysics. Resistance and transference.
Any consequent deconstruction would be negligible if it did not
take account of this resistance and this transference; it would
do little if it did not go after architecture as much as architecton-
ics. To go after it: not in order to attack, destroy or deroute it,
to criticise or disqualify it. Rather, in order to think it in fact, to
detach itself sufficiently to apprehend it in a thought which goes
beyond the theoremand becomes a work in its turn.
9 down and reconstructed along other axes. Without nostalgia,
Maintenant we will take the measure of the folies, of what oth-
ers would call the immeasurable hybris of Bernard Tschumi and
of what it offers to our thought. These folies destabilise mean-
ing, the meaning of meaning, the signifying ensemble of this
powerful architectonics. They put in question, dislocate, desta-
bilise or deconstruct the edifice of this configuration. It will be
said that they are madness in this. For in a polemos which
is without aggression, without the destructive drive that would
still betray a reactive affect within the hierarchy, they do battle
with the very meaning of architectural meaning, as it has been
bequeathed to us and as we still inhabit it. We should not avoid
the issue; if this configuration presides over what in the West
is called architecture, do these folies not rase it to the ground?
Do they not lead back to the desert of anarchitecture, a zero
degree of architectural writing where this writing would lose
itself, henceforth without finality, aesthetic aura, fundamentals,
hierarchical principles or symbolic signification, in short, in a
prose made of abstract, neutral, inhuman, useless, uninhabit-
able and meaningless volumes?
Precisely not. The folies affirm, and engage their affirmation
beyond this ultimately annihilating, secretly nihilistic repetition
of metaphysical architecture. They enter into the maintenant of
which I speak; they maintain, renew and reinscribe architecture.
They revive, perhaps, an energy which was infinitely anaes-
thetised, walled-in, buried in a common grave or sepulchral
nostalgia. For we must begin by emphasising this: the charter or
metaphysical frame whose configuration has just been sketched
was already, one could say, the end of architecture, its reign of
ends in the figure of death.
This charter had come to arraign the work, it imposes on it
norms or meanings which were extrinsic, if not accidental. It
made its attributes into an essence: formal beauty, finality,
utility, functionalism, inhabitable value, its religious or political
economyall the services, so many non-architectural or meta-
architectural predicates. By withdrawing architecture mainten-
antwhat I keep referring to in this way, using a paleonym, so
as to maintain a muffled appealby ceasing to impose these
alien norms on the work, the folies return architecture, faithfully,
to what architecture, since the very eve of its origin, should have
signed. The maintenant that I speak of will be this, most irreduc-
ible, signature. It does not contravene the charter, but rather
draws it into another text; it even subscribes to, and directs oth-
ers to subscribe to, what we will again call, later, a contract,
another play of the trait, of attraction and contraction.
A proposition that I do not make without caution and warnings.
Still, the signal of two red points:
These folies do not destroy. Tschumi always talks about
deconstruction/reconstruction, particularly concerning the
folie and the generation of its cube (formal combinations
and transformational relations). What is in question in The
Manhattan Transcripts is the invention of new relations, in
which the traditional components of architecture are broken
the most living act of memory. Nothing, here, of that nihilistic
gesture which would fulfill a certain theme of metaphysics; no
reversal of values aimed at an unaesthetic, uninhabitable, unus-
able, a-symbolical and meaningless architecture, an architecture
simply left vacant after the retreat of gods and men. And the
folieslike la folie in generalare anything but anarchic chaos.
Yet without proposing a new order, they locate the architec-
tural work in another place where, at least in its principle, its
essential impetus, it will no longer obey these external impera-
tives. Tschumis first concern will no longer be to organise
space as a function or in view of economic, aesthetic, epiph-
anic or techno-utilitarian norms. These norms will be taken into
consideration, but they will find themselves subordinated and
reinscribed in one place in the text and in a space which they no
longer command in the final instance. By pushing architecture
towards its limits, a place will be made for pleasure; each
folie will be destined for a given use, with its own cultural,
ludic, pedagogical, scientific and philosophical finalities. We
will say more later about its powers of attraction. All of
this answers to a programme of transfers, transformations or
permutations over which these external norms no longer hold
the final word. They will not have presided over the work, since
Tschumi has folded them into the general operation.
Yes, folded. What is the fold? The aim of re-establishing archi-
tecture in what should have been specifically its own is not
to reconstitute a simple of architecture, a simply architectural
architecture, through a purist or integratist obsession. It is no
longer a question of saving its own in the virginal immanence
of its economy and of returning it to its inalienable presence,
a presence which, ultimately, is non-representational, non-
mimetic and refers only to itself. This autonomy of architecture,
which would thus pretend to reconcile a formalism and a seman-
ticism in their extremes, would only fulfill the metaphysics it
pretended to deconstruct. The invention, in this case, consists
in crossing the architectural motif with what is most singular
and most parallel in other writings which are themselves drawn
into the said madness, in its plural, meaning photographic,
cinematographic, choreographic, and even mythographic writ-
ings. As The Manhattan Transcripts demonstrated (the same
is true, though in a different way, of La Villette), a narrative
montage of great complexity explodes, outside, the narrative
which mythologies contracted or effaced in the hieratic pres-
ence of the memorable monument. An architectural writing
interprets (in the Nietzschean sense of active, productive,
violent, transforming interpretation) events which are marked
by photography or cinematography. Marked: provoked, deter-
mined or transcribed, captured, in any case always mobilised
in a scenography of passage (transference, translation, trans-
gression from one place to another, from a place of writing
to another, graft, hybridization). Neither architecture nor anar-
chitecture: transarchitecture. It has it out with the event; it
no longer offers its work to users, believers or dwellers, to
contemplators, aesthetes or consumers. Instead, it appeals to
the other to invent, in turn, the event, sign, consign or counter-
sign: advanced by an advance made at the otherand mainte-
nant architecture.
(I am aware of a murmur: but doesnt this event you speak
of, which reinvents architecture in a series of only onces
which are always unique in their repetition, isnt it what takes
place each time not in a church or a temple, or even in a polit-
ical placenot in them, but rather, as them, reviving them,
for example, during each Mass when the body of Christ,
etc., when the body of the King or of the nation presents or
announces itself? Why not, if at least it could happen again,
happen through (across) architecture, or even up to it? Without
venturing further in this direction, although still acknowledging
its necessity, I will say only that Tschumis architectural folies
make us think about what takes place when, for example, the
eucharistic event goes through [transir] a church, ici, mainte-
nant [here, now], or when a date, a seal, the trace of the other 119
are finally laid on the body of stone, this time in the movement
of its dis-appearance.)
10
Therefore, we can no longer speak of a properly architectural
moment, the hieratic impassibility of the monument, this hyle-
morphic complex that is given once and for all, permitting no
trace to appear on its body because it afforded no chance of
transformation, permutation or substitutions. In the folies of
which we speak, on the contrary, the event undoubtedly under-
goes this trial of the monumental moment; however, it inscribes
it, as well, in a series of experiences. As its name indicates, an
experience traverses: voyage, trajectory, translation, transfer-
ence. Not with the object of a final presentation, a face-to-face
with the thing itself, nor in order to complete an odyssey of
consciousness, the phenomenology of mind as an architectural
step. The route through the folies is undoubtedly prescribed,
from point to point, to the extent that the point-grid counts on
a programme of possible experiences and new experiments
(cinema, botanical garden, video workshop, library, skating rink,
gymnasium). But the structure of the grid2 and of each cube
for these points are cubesleaves opportunity for chance,
points
formal invention, combinatory transformation, wandering. Such
opportunity is not given to the inhabitant or the believer, the