Architectural schools have always focused on the end product more than the process, leading to a known phenomenon of static architecture, i.e. lacking essence, movement, and value. Looking at Bernard Tschumi’s work, The Manhattan Transcripts, his theory uses the notion of human movement to create forms. His methods are quite cinematic, as it adopts the montage theory – the succession of frames – into the work of architecture, giving readers the flexibility to move around and explore spatial construction. However unfamiliar and disjunctive Tschumi’s work might seem, it holds together every line and every axis with the surroundings.
As an assistant lecturer at the department of Architecture, and a former practicing architect, I have come to notice that architectural products of the market are a strong reflection of the educational techniques, and vice versa. Trending issues used to address the gap increase between academia and practice. Yet, recent attempts from Architecture schools, bridging the gap, highlight the dominance of the market over education. No longer is architecture a direct communication with inhabitants, but rather a formalistic economic necessity that emphasizes form over essence. As a result, architecture education has adopted such a formalistic approach within its milieu by excluding alternative forms of art and effort.
Nikos Salingaros questions the intentions of modernist educational institutions, “The system is desperately trying to protect its sovereignty – not by improving its methods, but by ruthlessly eliminating any competing ideas”. In other words, according to Salingaros, architecture schools embraced materialist intellect that corresponds to post-modern outcries rather than innovation and creative meaning.
We do not talk about Space in Architecture
The newly-born form of architecture has been continuously criticized for lacking essence, specifically for degrading the role of space in foregrounding architectural value. It is not new that studies of architectural space are an integral part of contemporary interdisciplinary research. Space, being an articulated entity, has gone through a transformation of perception among different periods. From the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Gothic, the Renaissance, all the way to the present time, the conception of space changed from a one-dimensional existence to a four-dimensional one. Thus, architecture has come to include the metaphysical being of its experience, i.e. the spatial praxis.
In line with the post-structuralist thinking, American architect Bernard Tschumi acknowledges the kinesthetic importance of space, body, and movement. His approach to spatiality induces a form of paradox – the paradox of ideal space and real space, i.e. mental process and social praxis respectively. Tschumi’s body of theory claims that such paradox stems from the folding and unfolding of both aspects in a “Panglossian world where social and economic forces are conveniently absent”.
For Tschumi, space does not exist without event, and architecture does not exist without a program. The event is a conceptual tool that is capable of transforming the program into a spatial experience through the movement of bodies. Claiming that architecture is not an expression of mere structural extant, Tschumi emphasizes the nature of architecture as a performance, a means of communication; “it becomes a discourse of events and spaces”.
The Pyramid, the Labyrinth & the Visuals
Foregrounding essence over form is Tschumi’s main theoretical aspiration in the sense of re-evaluating the role of architecture in the practice of personal freedom. The foundation of this approach is connectivity and dynamism, as there is no fixed relationship between architectural form and the events taking place within it, instead it is a dynamic and conflictual relation. Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts explore this relation as an attempt to re-narrate an architectural understanding of reality.
The Manhattan Transcripts seek to reveal an internal logic underlying buildings and cities. Through focusing on unnecessary activities, e.g. luxury, arts, games, etc. and extracting from them the notations of movement, Tschumi reveals the dynamic behavior of architecture. This philosophy attempts to overcome the paradox of architecture, identified with the dualism of the pyramid and the labyrinth. The pyramid is the domination of idea over matter, it resides within conceptual and dematerialized reason where the subject is detached from the object. On the other hand, the labyrinth is the space of sensations that is directly connected with the subject’s sensory experience, hence the materiality of space is foreground.The Manhattan Transcripts are a development of Tschumi’s visual language, which shows plans and elevations of architectural spaces and schemes of movement.
There exists a crossover between Tschumi’s vision and that of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein whose diagrammatic methodology – Tschumi’s main source of inspiration – evolved into ideas of movement through space. Both Tschumi’s transcripts and Eisenstein’s films trace the different movement of people walking around an architectural spatial ensemble that does not depend on a single frame but a succession of frames or spaces. Their use of the frame contradicts its purpose of maintaining an equal of normality, rather they acknowledge the single unit frame as “healthy, conformist and predictable, regular and comforting, correct”.
TO REALLY APPRECIATE ARCHITECTURE, YOU MAY EVEN NEED TO COMMIT MURDER - BERNARD TSCHUMI
Breaking Down the Conventions
Tschumi's Transcripts are an attempt to question the modes of representation of architectural techniques that are commonly used among architects, e.g. plans, sections, and perspectives. They were eventually a product of Tschumi’s breakdown of architectural conventions giving more freedom to each new part autonomously in line with the modern narrative. The plans of the Park, the section of the Street, and the perspective of the Block all follow an internal logic of their own and widely differ from the traditional method of representation.
This breakdown provided the readers/audiences to be engaged with the imagery of the events. The images have undergone a theoretical move “from the optic to the haptic and from sight to site in architecture”, aka Einfühlung. Coming into contact with elements creates what German philosopher Gernot Böhme calls the Atmosphere – the ability to sense space without being physically in it.
Similar in process, cinema images are manufactured images, which include spaces within which the performances of characters are predefined. Cinematic space is created, deconstructed, and re-created by the audience, a methodological tool that emphasizes the importance of imagery as a “[representation] of a whole world, which is reflected in it, as in a drop of water”.
Like a filmmaker, Bernard Tschumi plots architectural drawings that are not architectural, i.e. relying on unnecessary routine activities, e.g. running, exercising, etc. to deconstruct space into the narrative and the artistic. He tends to break traditional guidelines of contemporary representation, and replace it with abstract thinking that includes: 1) De-structuring, emphasizing the structure of the building rather than the aesthetics, 2) Superimposition, which strengthens the previous point via opposing all that architecture stands for, i.e. anti-hierarchy, anti-structure and anti-form, and 3) Contextualization, as opposed to what was believed during the 1980s and 1990s that context is mere visual content.
So, what do you think about Bernard Tschumi's work? Do you think it is a valuable addition to architecture education? Do you think architecture schools have already adopted such technique? Please share your comments, ideas, thoughts, criticism, and/or any sort of information and/or interesting facts.