Ca va. Ca va bien!

L'urbanisme en 3 leçons facile

L'urbanisme commence avec la localisation du stationnement.

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[Tommer Peterson]

David, ceci est grand ! Ma famille est à l'origine le Québec. Peut-être vous deviendrez le nouveau héros !

[winifer skattebol]

MINUTES OF THE UNIVERSITY SEMINAR ON THE CITY (#459A

MEETING DATE: September 27, 2004
TIME: 5:30pm – 8:30pm
PLACE: Faculty House, Columbia University

CHAIR: Lisa Keller
RAPPORTEUR: Nancy H. Kwak

SPEAKER: Bernard Tschumi, Architect New York/Paris, Columbia University
TOPIC: City-Making Architecture

ATTENDING: Michael Miscione, Carol Willis, David Dunbar (Cityterm), Barnet Schecter, Kenneth Cobb (NY Municipal Archives), Mosette Broderick, Catherine McNeur (Columbia), Kenneth T. Jackson(Columbia), David Smiley (Barnard), Lisa Keller, Brigid Hains, Michael Innis-Jimenez, Julia Harmyton, Polina Gorokhovskaya, Nicholas Bloom, Herbert Schwarz (Teachers of Social Studies), Herbert Gans(Columbia), Peter Marcuse (Columbia).

Introduction
Chair Lisa Keller began the meeting by thanking Owen Gutfreund for his previous leadership, and by welcoming everyone to the beginning of the 2004-05 City Seminar series. Lisa then introduced the speaker for the night, Bernard Tschumi. Lisa first spoke of Bernard’s work in Paris, Zurich, London, Princeton, and New York, noting some of his major works as well as his writings on architecture and disjunction.
KELLER: Amongst his many accomplishments, what brought my interest to him was his work on the Acropolis Museum in Athens, where I lived for seven years and never was there a winner of that contest until Bernard came along. Only he could do it. He has graciously agreed to speak with us tonight.
Presentation

TSCHUMI: When Lisa approached me about this city seminar, we talked about the theme and of course when you are asked for a title four months before, you change it later…
The city-making title is related to what I’m going to show you in a very specific sense. Increasingly, in the last 20, 25 years, the idea that architecture could help shape the identity of the city is become more and more an accepted fact. Without going far into the history, you could say sure, the Cathedrals gave an identity to Chartre for example – and in Australia, Sydney, etc. identity comes from an extraordinary opera house. The museum puts the city back on the map. This is what is called the Bilbao Effect.
Small cities that want to have an identity want a building that will put them on the map. The motives could be cultural or low mercantile tourist reasons.
Not long ago I was asked to participate in an architectural competition for a glass museum in Yerevan, Armenia. I had never heard of this place before. The obvious reason was to create a Bilbao Effect for this city. In other words it means that people believe the single building can provide an identity.
This is okay provided that one ask oneself not, “What does this building look like?”, but “What does it do?”
Does this building also create a sense of public-ness or public space for this particular city? Does the city act, not unlike the cathedral, as a great meeting point for the population of the city? Something that works as a generator of public life... So that’s a little harder. Take New York City for example. In recent history: I was struck a month ago when a large group of people decided to express their public political opinion in Central Park. The city, the mayor for reasons we won’t get into, decided Central Park was not a good idea. Where could we go? In Paris, they go to the Place de la Concorde, in London, Trafalgar Square, in China, Tiananmen Square. Every major city has a place to go and gather as a public meeting. New York City doesn’t quite have that.
The World Trade Center discussion was also about public-ness. It is not about the memorial, it is about transportation, trade. Maybe that’s because that’s what New York was about – about greed, as someone said at a recent symposium here at Columbia. So the question I ask is about the relationship between what building looks like and what it does. Of course I have an agenda. I would like you to participate in public life. I try to develop that argument not in terms of a form in a public space, but rather between a concept or idea and a context. That context is the city. Why do I say concept rather than form?
It’s because I believe as opposed to most architectural historians, what distinguishes a building from architecture is its concept, not its form.
It’s not what it looks like but what it does.
So I would like to show you a few examples and go literally from the first city which is Athens, to the last which is Beijing. And in between, I will touch upon different issues, and then please ask a lot of questions.
[images: Acropolis and museum site] The first question that any architect has to answer is how can you build anything in front of this building? (The Acropolis) It is the most well-known monument of western civilization, etc. The second challenge is it happens there are on this site valuable archaeological remnants. Plus there is a neoclassical nineteenth-century military building built near the site as well. At the edge of the city, with a subway station, historical streets around, and remnants… The third challenge has to do with competition between cities. It so happens some of the pieces are in the British Museum. The idea is that the Brits will return them to the museum because it’ll be so fabulous.
[image: British Museum] In terms of its immediate surroundings, two half sequences are repeated to relocate the marbles exactly in the same configuration as opposed to in the British Museum, they are facing inwards (instead of outward) and not in right sequential order. The grey London light is not quite the same as the Greek one either.
So here, I left room for a subway station, kept the existing nineteenth-century work so that the building would be hovering over the excavation. You would be able to see. By building on pilotes above it, you can see through the glass to excavation. A layered view would be recreated. You arrive at top and see simultaneously Parthenon and frieze.
I was attacked by the union of local architects; some of them said you cannot build a modernist building in the context of the Parthenon. On the contrary, I cannot build a simulacrum or parody of the Doric style for a museum that contains those artifacts right next to absolute perfection. On the contrary, I was going to try to reach a material perfection – I didn’t talk about forms. Instead, I sought marble, concrete, and glass – the most simple materials.
The idea was that this building would not only be a place of artifact but also representative of that moment when a city moves into the twenty-first century.
One thing that is specific to this culture: Greece entered the European economic community, organized the Olympic games, etc. for one simple reason: it wants to make a leap ahead. Athens and Beijing have one particular thing in common: they want to jump ahead of time in terms of their historical development. They’re trying to do in ten years what America did in 100 years, and Europe in 1000 years. How with a building do you mark that step ahead?
You try to impose symbolism, sometime under the guise of contextualization. In Boston, architects say you have to respect the style, and this is what we suggest. Historical postmodernism trying to in the name of visual coherence of city – and we see it all over New York – trying to do the most atrocious pastiche without thinking about what it looked like.
You see this not only in America or in Prince Charles, England. In China, you have the Great Wall. [image: bathrooms at Great Wall] The Public lavatories have the crenelated context. But that’s not what I want to talk about.
Now, if you don’t want to imitate the past, you can say let’s do something very different – one is Los Angeles, the other is Bilbao. Does the concept have anything to do with the context?
Not the first time. [paired images] Look at LeCorbusier’s Monastery or City Hall, Boston 1963. They are mimicking each other. This is not the first time we see mimicking. [paired images] Villa Rotunda and just outside London, you see something very similar.
Concept vs. context
= or ≠
generic vs. specific
?
An interesting thing we are all aware of: tabula rasa versus the genius of the place. Perhaps the first is about concept, about ideal, and the latter about context. Throughout the history of architecture, this opposition has always been there. Utopian architecture will always be trying to escape from place, and therefore trying to develop buildings which can be anywhere. But at the same time it will try to adjust and adapt, to contextualize. So my question is what if one did it a little differently?
A first example: factory used as an entertainment center. [image] This is a ballroom, riding school in Northern France. The first cinema was here in the 1920s. It received a demolition permit and the authorities wanted to build in its place what it called an electronic Bauhaus, a place where contemporary artists would develop their work, produce, show it to the public, deal with crossovers. Multimedia. I went to see the site, and the building had been abandoned for 25 years, it was leaking everywhere, but inside there were some quite extraordinary spaces - spaces that my budget wouldn’t allow me to reconstitute. To me, that building was very much a sort of metaphor for the city itself. The city is full of architects that are totally inappropriate in terms of contemporary evolution, and therefore had to be torn down. So I suggested large electronic roof over it – air conditioning, all the modern amenities – and as an umbrella keeping snow loads out, so the new building could literally hover over the neighborhood, be new and old at the same time. No attempt to make them work together.
The interface between old and new created unexpected spaces. This was not designed – just part of conception logic. Platforms were used as places of public performances, as were the catwalks. New public spaces were created.
Form is given by the logic of the problem?
Another example: Paris slaughterhouses. How do you build what would be the largest park in Paris since Hausmann since the 1850s, a full 125 acres. I said well it’s like a little piece of the city. First let’s design infrastructure. So I said we would have the movement vectors and points of activities all on existing grounds. We’re superimposing three different systems so that the combination is simultaneously slaughterhouses of 1850s, an exhibition hall, a museum of science & technology, a music hall, and more. You would have the twentieth-century city, nineteenth-century city, all together. The issue was not about what it looked like but what it did. The way the project was organized was that things like the canal, elevated promenade, etc. I won’t get into specifics, but the logic of the concept led to what the building would look like. Of course, it’s very important what those buildings do. Those buildings are generators of public space. The space is there so that it becomes a major new space in the city.
Another example. Totally different physical circumstances: That’s the city I was born in. Luzon. I remember entering this building on the fourth floor and going down… It was very three dimensional. The competition was organized for the bourgeoisie and the banks all on the upper level, and industry and police all on the bottom. Somebody told me that if you look at Manhattan, the churches are on hills and the police stations in valleys. We proposed to keep some of the warehouses but build inhabited bridges over the valleys keeping some of warehouses, and have one bridge for museum, university, shopping. The building – part of it is now completed. The juxtaposition between nineteenth-century bank buildings and not trying to be sentimental – showing the difference between the two, playing with differences. Engaging in dialogue, not closing it to the city itself.
So these are a few projects starting with a specific context. But I ask myself what happens when you don’t have a context. When you have places like this [image: empty concrete space] You have these types of spaces all over America and all over Europe too.
The context is not going to give you any clues or strategies, any intelligent way to proceed. If you have a large auditorium on a disused airfield, and 8,000 people have to work in this building – the very size of the building becomes its own context. Double-envelope construction, separate envelope for acoustics, and keeping weather out, and between two envelopes is where the people go – creating public space because you’re interested in staging the movement of crowds.
Can generic contexts generate concepts?
Here you have to start from scratch. Invent the metal envelope to keep the rain out, I lined this one here [imnage] like the lining of coat – but in wood to bring warmth to building. Function and content: you have here the factory, craftsmen and designers and administrators or commercial interests all inside with glass and circulation of air. This is a building with no context. You don’t try to imitate or invent one. It’s part of its own logic itself. There are walkways around it, offices, dining spaces. Using movement and circulation as a way to activate a building became one of my interests over a series of projects. Here an unrealized project in Troy… [image]
Architects don’t choose contexts, they choose concepts.
At the University of Cincinnati, a sports museum project façade became an expression of the building itself. [image]
It’s not the same to build in Beijing as in New York or Rome. When I first went to Beijing last year, I knew I was a little late, but I had a childhood fantasy of small streets, one-floor streets and I quickly realized that most of it had disappeared and was still disappearing at great speed to be replaced by 20-storey massive towers with rather large apartments, all fairly identical. That whole piece of the city was being erased. The problem is – and that’s where I come with my starting point – it is also erasing a mode of life, a place to meet and communicate. The start of the city is about a meeting ground. The destruction of this and the replacement of public space by multiple eight-lane highways had destroyed what had made the identity of cities. What could one have done?
Architects – western ones – are one of the first to go there and encourage the local culture to destroy everything. So I was taken to a place in the northeast corner between the fourth and fifth ring toward the airport. There was an old factory built by East Germans, abandoned for 10-15 years, and taken over by artists who were using it for a series of exhibits and galleries. The site, which is the equivalent of two large New York blocks, had suddenly become a center of cultural life in the city. A buzzing place, the heart of new culture in Beijing. But I was told it would be demolished and replaced by 12 of these towers. And 10 million square feet had to be built. Economically they thought that was best. In New York, there isn’t too much space between the façade and the inside, but Chinese buildings are much deeper and bulkier.
So we said ok – what about trying to build these 10 million square feet not instead of factory buildings, but on top of them?
And so back in New York we started to work very seriously. We looked at the plan. Wherever there was free space we could locate a support, a column that could literally be the anchor like the pile of a bridge. First we looked at –we did high massing studies. In order to accommodate the subtleties of context, we arrived at a fairly irregular placement and then established an irregular grid or lattice. We found out China had a whole tradition of lattices – we were quite excited – so the idea was accommodating restraints of the site while leaving a lot of space for the public below. It was a new cultural area for the city, prompted by the life already there in the galleries and warehouses.
Exactly a week ago, I was in Beijing giving a press conference. Interesting results: One of the developers said you only need to do 2.5 million square feet to meet the government requirement. See if lower configuration is possible because what we proposed is very high density – 10-storey building on supports.
The intention was to look at a city not as something that you replaced when it’s obsolete – not as something that is purely where you put something next to it by clearing a piece of it – but potentially having your cake and eating it too. Use a device – like in the Acropolis, like in the Arts Center, where you put a big roof over old roofs, or in Beijing, where the two can coexist – taking into consideration that the existing space is either historical or simply has a public function, and that it can become a generator of the city or a piece of the city.
Q & A:
KENNETH T. JACKSON: I’m going to say something politically incorrect. Everything that exists in cities is not necessarily worth saving. Are we making a fetish out of what was there? Why go to such extraordinary lengths to build on top of urban fabric that’s already there? I do think there’s a value to cities growing over time. But could this not be seen as the other flip of that – because it was a factory, let’s keep that old thing even if it’s ugly and never was that important. Isn’t it a lot of effort for this?
BERNARD TSCHUMI: Are you making an aesthetic judgment – factories are ugly, inconvenient? Or – in our cities there’s not much that we’re saving. In Florence, even small streets in Venice, if I don’t look at the grand canal where you have palazzis, but look at buildings, most are not terribly interesting, not worth saving. But when you take them away, you take something important away from the structure and character of that place. Venice is a good example. You wouldn’t do that because there are certain things that you cannot quite replace. When I showed you the first building that became the arts center… In Beijing, it has been the heart of public life. Sure, I agree with you that you could start from scratch. A new arts center with all the best architects, etc. But I don’t trust my fellow architects- well, I trust them to be brilliant and build fantastic buildings, but that will be plunked as an object …
JACKSON: Are you afraid Beijing is going to transform itself into a boring city? Is that the motive for keeping all these older buildings, some of them “shacks”?
TSCHUMI: A few of the so-called “shacks” are being kept for touristic restaurants, done-up and all this. In a sense it’s the Disneyland of China.
JACKSON: Our version of the tenement museum.
TSCHUMI: It’s not that it’s an unpleasant city. I enjoyed it immensely except for the enormous pollution. However we talked about the nineteenth-century city, and one has clear representation of that in Prague, London, Paris. The representative city of the twentieth city, well the greatest one of that is clearly New York City. Now we are well into the twenty-first century. What will be the city of this century? How will we invent it? I cannot help thinking that it is a city that accommodates the cities of previous eras. If we all believe in density – somebody told me that they should have built New Beijing next to Old Beijing – but they cannot do that. So I say, second best, let’s build on top.
CAROL WILLIS: What you showed us is mostly structure, even buildings as infrastructure. Do you believe in programming space?
TSCHUMI: The program that was given to us was a certain number of residential accommodations. Most architects don’t do programming – people who put up money do for other grand purposes. However, your role as an architect is to establish the connections between the different parts. If I say a kindergarten is going to be on the roof or ground level, it’s a hell of a difference. If I say where the supermarkets go, that’ll make a huge difference.
WILLIS: The way cities survive and change is in the shell. So I guess I’m asking about an attitude…
TSCHUMI: If I project myself 50 years from now, next cultural revolution, you can ask yourself what would happen with large mega-structures spanning 50 feet… sure, we can transform for another cycle of life.
PETER MARCUSE: I wonder if the concept of public space doesn’t need to be reexamined in the light of 9-11 and security issues. The medieval issue of public space as a place where people come together and communicate and talk politics it seems to me is a social and political issue rather than an architectural issue. Two examples: one is New York. There are great public spaces in New York and Central Park would’ve been a great place for the protests. The fact that it wasn’t used isn’t because the space wasn’t there but because of social constraints. The idea of 7th Avenue as a public space – that depends on where the police are and where the barriers are put – not about the physical composition of space. Airports – surveillance, security, restrictions on activities and entrance – means that to talk about it as public space is a different use of the word public. I wonder if security consciousness doesn’t accentuate a privatization of public space.
TSCHUMI: I have to admit that I’m surprised to get this question from you, my friend, an old leftist. First, the walk up and down 7th Avenue… Well, the reason why it couldn’t be in Central Park is that if you have a large crowd that sees its large size and can focus on one point, it’s a very different identity that that crowd feels about itself than when it’s over two miles and diluted. Sure, it’s a lot easier for the police. The question of security, large crowds, can we have stadiums anymore, so on – I happen to be slightly optimistic. I think it is a temporary aberration of our current condition in America. If you go to Europe or China I don’t think people are half as obsessed as we are in this time and place.
MARCUSE: Athens?
TSCHUMI: Well yes, but Athens is in the unusual position of being on a television stage. Otherwise, you have yesterday in Shanghai, a Formula One Grand Prix with 200,000 spectators. The issue is yes security, why not. But I hope not at the expense of public space. Otherwise you could say indeed, let’s put moats and walls through Trafalgar Square, and other places around the world and say no, you can’t gather, it’s dangerous. Having grown up and seen the Algerian War and living in London during IRA bombings, you see phases, but I don’t think – well, I think it’s a phase.
MARCUSE: Are you not concerned about security in airports?
TSCHUMI: Once inside, no.
LISA KELLER: In reference to old buildings being converted. In northern Greece, I remember an old tobacco house being planned to be converted to cultural center. It seems as if there’s a trend to convert spaces to cultural centers when the money is available. Do you think that this is significant in terms of public spaces? Retaining spaces for the public…
TSCHUMI: Yes, but I don’t want to be like “Bernard is interested in saving old places and giving them another lease on life.” I want to take them to the next level. Sure, artists were seduced by loft spaces, and found them more open to experiment than white-wall galleries. But there’s no reason to conceive of entirely new spaces and conducive to new sensibilities. So it’s not about saving places only. It’s also about taking it to another dimension. The city that can be multiple, heterogeneous, not simply of one period. Hence this sort of heterogeneity is what I find interesting because it develops a different sensibility. It’s not recreating or saving the past. It’s about taking the past into the future. It’s not necessarily the right solution. For example, in New York, you’re going to have the opening of a new MOMA in two months. It’s interesting to see what has happened. I was one of three finalists for the competition, and what we had done was a strategy not unlike what I have shown you. Building much of new either digging into old or above. At the time the question was should one consider modern art a unified field or an addition of different periods? And the trustees wanted homogeneity, that overall look, that type of aesthetic. They selected that. I’m sure it’s a fine building. But looking at it from the outside, well, maybe we all missed something. Why did we say yes keep MOMA where it is? It’s simply – I could say it doesn’t fit. Boy, we could have had a field day saying it should be where stadium is, and more fitting to Manhattan than a stadium. So these kinds of decisions are crucial. Architects have a great tendency to want to give over-recipes to solve all the problems of world. Obviously, this type of recipe does not work. Sometimes you keep, sometimes you raze.
KELLER to JACKSON: Does that sound better?
JACKSON: In Beijing you say you’re programmed to put 10 million square feet on this – is there a substantial difference between Greece and France and the US? They’re all trying to maximize their return out of this piece of ground.
TSCHUMI: Money is the same everywhere, right? The connotation and the culture of these different places – here I have to admit I’m the apprentice-sorcerer. You don’t know so you implement – you have to build to check if the damn thing is right or not. Look at social housing on the outskirt of Paris entirely inhabited by Muslim residents. The architects thought it would be the new bourgeoisie living there. So you have unknowns. It’s always interesting to see - what would be the potential mechanisms to create public space? I try to maintain that notion of public space. Guidelines in terms of what works and doesn’t.
WILLIS: I don’t’ mean to oversimplify, but isn’t the basic contradiction – no, duality – between the commissions you receive and those you win in competition and those that aren’t realized – is whether the government is the client or not. In which case public space has a real legitimacy as opposed to trying to deal with or trick or persuade the private developer to forfeit part of his space.
TSCHUMI: I have to think that your oversimplification is right – it’s hard to find a counterexample.
MARCUSE: Public space depends on the program, not the architect.
QUESTION: The idea of the context informing the concept or not informing the concept – the design coming out of the context – responding in some way to it, is obviously significant. But if you think of a context that is dynamic, then what is the way the building is going to alter the context or that changing dynamism?
TSCHUMI: I think the key word is dynamics. Of course it’s going to change…
QUESTION: The public space that you’ve taken the trouble to nurture – but once those 10 million square feet are in place, the demands might take over…
TSCHUMI: Reduce the numbers – avoid the overwhelming elephant arriving type of thing. Also there’s another issue: the fact that it’s only residential. So these issues are getting into fine-tuning. But I was trying to engage in the larger issue. Right after 9-11, all of us obsessed about what should be done there. And my point was always not what it looks like, but what does it do. The city for the twenty-first century. But the developer had totally different views…
DAVID SMILEY: I’d like to switch gears to context-less places. I guess I would just ask you to say more about -- what about those context-less places? Where did you start? Why do they look the way they do?
TSCHUMI: Some of you are historians, writers, physics… and you know that you have some interests and you use a series of circumstances – in other words, assignments. People come to you, they want you to write an article, book – and you use these circumstances in order to develop an exploration of your own. And quite often you look back and you say this is what I’m interested in.
One is extremely abstract, and the other is reality-based. Today I talked about reality. The more abstract is from when I studied to be a little more than an architect. I asked myself, what is architecture? Can you define it? At the time, I was trying to get away from all the ideologies of architecture – because architecture is loaded with ideologies like religions – you’re trained in one ideology – and I asked myself what would be the common ground, the essential dimension of what architecture is. I arrived at the notion that there were three simple things. One, movement. You need to go into a building, walk through it. Second, envelopes. You have to enclose it. Third, you have to have something happening in it. Then I became interested in designing buildings that would say no more than that. The envelope buildings that you’ve seen – the concert hall – or even the watch factory – all proceed from this. You could say I fetishize the envelope, the glass stairs, and the elevators. I stage the activities. But I’m trying simply to push a concept of what the degree zero of architecture is.
So pure abstraction, pure concept: on the other hand, there’s the other stream that looks at contextual constraints and tries to use them as a springboard for concept. In other words, the context is the starting point, and it leads to a concept. By conceptualizing the context. In Greece, in other projects, you contextualize the concept. The building which is most difficult was the student center for Columbia University, where there is a context which is unbelievably rigorous and demanding. The concept didn’t come from the context, and the concept had to work within these boundaries. So the concept was contextualized, but some of the context came from the concept. McKim Mead and White worked with a series of quadrangles, and at the place of the student center, that’s what was happening. So I said, okay, we’re going to build a wing on Broadway which is equivalent to that. Another closer to Butler, and in between is a void, a place of circulation, and a big auditorium. So I was playing with McKim Mead and White and the void. But the committee – there were 17 people in that committee…
Listen it’s 9 o’clock.
KELLER: Thank you so much for speaking with us, Bernard.
[END]