與楚米對話

因為整理資料，重新整理楚米的理論，在網站上閱讀到此篇文章，覺得受用。
在充滿技術電腦軟件導向的設計趨勢下，有時候也該停下腳步，看看自己在哪裡。
設計思潮不會中斷，遲早都會聯在一起。
原址網站 original website

避免遺失連結，將原文附上如下。

A conversation with
Bernard Tschumi
by Liliana Gómez


Movements, positions and moments of trans-lating/rotating in architectural thinking

Conceptualization and Transcription: Liliana Gómez
Camera: Steffen Popescu


The Manhattan Transcripts differ from most architectural drawings insofar as they are neither real projects nor mere fantasies.
They propose to transcribe an architectural interpretation of reality.
(...) Their implicit purpose has to do with the twentieth-century city. [1]


The act of transcribing an architectural interpretation of reality raises the question of how to define architecture after Modernism. The question came up in a recent conversation with Bernard Tschumi, the New York based architect. Tschumi had raised the question before, in 1974, when he proposed a change in the relation between architectural practice, representation, and thinking architecture. His proposal suggests a shift whose legacy has yet to be confronted by succeeding generations of architects. Although best known for his architectural and urban projects, realized mostly in France, Tschumi is also known for the emergence of Deconstruction theories in architectural debates, particularly for his proposal of a singular conception of architecture’s definition in the context of a postmodern society and culture. The following conversation took place on June 1, 2005, at his New York office, and it took a surprising trajectory when approaching the issue of the state of architecture today.

Prefixes and their contrapuntal routes

Liliana Gómez: With no doubt, today at the 21 st century as it reflects all the ruptures and unfulfilled predicaments of the 20 th century, the questions of crisis of representation, of discourse and of the grand narratives are brought back when the city and its architecture are considered - in search for different forms of writing history. In the processes' complexity, we can observe an attention to movements and positions, logics and practices of "trans-lating" and maybe "rotating". Once, diagnosing a social and theoretical unstable state, you propose in an essay 1987 the prefixes "de-", "dis-", "ex-" to outline a radical shift with programmatic impact on analytic and descriptive categories. You said: "Ex-centric, dis-integrated, dis-located, dis-juncted, deconstructed, dismantled, disassociated, discontinous, deregulated... de-, dis-, ex-. These are the prefixes of today" [2]. Today, we can observe certain signs of fatigue concerning those prefixes, which provoked a necessary decentering of the one's certain position of discourse. Now, we see clearly the transitional state by reverting to prefixes like "trans-" or even "re-", re-defining the conceptual shift once made [3]. Could you as an architect or a philosopher explain your attention to those small linguistic entities once chosen and if you consider them still adequate and programmatic to explain the state we are in? Could you also explain the paradigmatic impact those prefixes had and maybe still have on architectural thinking and practice?

Bernard Tschumi: I could speak about an hour, but I try to keep it very short. And I will start with "de-", "dis-", "ex-", and immediately go to the heart of the subject, in using the prefixes as a tool, as a mode of operation, either for thinking or for doing architecture. You oppose "trans -", "re-", to "de-", "dis-", "ex-". I would suggest that, in order to redefine, you have also to dismantle what you are going to define. In other words, certain processes happen in a sequence . While I will agree that in architecture the notion of "de-", "dis-", "ex-" may have lived most of its useful life, I would also say it was an absolutely indispensable moment of a trajectory. In order to redefine what architecture is, I need to dismantle what it has been and what it may constitute and then bring these pieces back together in a different order. Let me give you an example: If I say that architecture is not simply about façades or static volumes and therefore I want to introduce the idea of movement, I have to be analytical and identify what is static in architecture, so I can bring movement into the equation. So, in a first move, I say that, for example, architecture is dismantled into spaces, events and movement . Before you are synthetic, you may have to be analytical. So, the "re-" and the "trans-" tend to be synthetic, while the "de-", "dis-", "ex-" are analytical. Regarding the " trans-" and the "rotation", that is another story, and I am going to ask you one question now. To which extent do you think that "trans-" and the "rotation" are also reflective of today's globalism?

Liliana Gómez: It is an interesting question because it refers to the observation that those prefixes indicate a kind of movement or shift. And in this sense they can be understood against the background of the political and the wanted, that means programmatically. At least the "trans-" is quite programmatic. Maybe, in order to hide a bit what we called since fifteen years "globalization", having a negative connotation. Today we try to speak much more about "transnationalization", for example, which might be connoted more positively. I would also think that "trans-" indicates this movement in a almost metaphorical way, even if it doesn't reflect a descriptive or analytic dimension. Simultaneously, the prefix "trans-" points to an ambiguity - which is interesting enough about the "trans-" -in a similar way as the prefix "re-" does, because both refer to the movement of taking something which is somewhere else and bringing it back. This movement of bringing it back and bringing it in, indicates the ambiguity's logic and its practices.

Bernard Tschumi: As we are talking today, two days after the vote that took place in France about the European Community, and indeed, when you bring up the notion of "transnationality", you are simultaneously talking about one thing and its opposite, because transnationality crosses over, through entities, and at the same time, preserves some of the aspects of those entities. It is also a right to the difference, as globalism tries to erase all differences. And I think at the moment the fundamental discussion taking place right now, is the fact that you have to keep that notion of difference and bring it into the architectural work. Nobody can have the global modernist attitude of saying a certain kind of architecture can be exported unchanged everywhere. Immediately as you take an architectural object and you export it into a different context, it becomes something else: It is misread because misreading and translating go together, as you know "tradittore/translatore", "traitor/translator". The misreading is one dimension of it, but the other dimension which is crucial is that the context will contaminate the object, or in the other way around, the object will contaminate the context. I would oppose context and concept, saying that we find ourselves at a period where you either conceptualize context or contextualize concepts. In other words, concepts deal with differences but also with homogeneity, contexts only deal with differences. Let me tell you the reason why I bring this up: When I read your text about "trans-" and "rotation" [4], I realized that today's movement of ideas resembles the way once upon a time, germs and viruses stopped being local but became global as people started to travel around the world. Today, ideas move extremely fast, without even allowing time to know how and why they were generated. If you do not look into "de-", "dis-", "ex-", you risk immediately moving into the consumption of the synthetic.

Architecture in search for its "Grundbegriffe"

Liliana Gómez: It is not a secret, as you are reflecting it with your last book Concept vs. context vs. content, that you are working with the dynamic relationship between those different notions proposing a kind of method of "genealogy of concepts" [5]. And it is not a secret that the method is as well discussed as "Begriffsgeschichte" mainly in the field of history of science and social history [6]. As you say, architects often work quite efficiently and sometimes critically with "inventive categories" applied to specific economic and also political demands. I want to stress here that the method of "Begriffsgeschichte" which came up in a context of cultural transition where concepts lost their traditional dimension of significance, their concrete contexts and the certain terminological use because of the shifts in aesthetic uses in everyday life implying a crisis of cultural and aesthetic forms [7]. This is also sketched out by Michel Foucault in L'Archéologie du savoir where he observes the concepts' multiple theoretical "milieux" as a constitution process stressing the variations of the concept's identity [8]. In this sense, concept is also understood as operator. This process of "trans-lating" reminds me of what you also have been working, writing, thinking in your early works. Especially the "Begriffsgeschichte" stresses that concepts are memory, that means, as inter-modal all senses help to make form the concepts' memory. And lately in your work Index of Architecture [9], a kind of dictionary, a kind of search for definitions of architectural concepts in order to find out certain architectural principle concepts -"Grundbegriffe" - you transgress into a much more socio-cultural and political context. In this sense, concepts are used as memory and resistance. Apparently, your preoccupation about concepts reflects a kind of desire and motivation throughout your work. Maybe you can try to explain how it could so strongly involve your architectural thinking since the early works.

Bernard Tschumi: I like very much that you are going back to the German expression of "Begriff" and "Grundbegriff" - that difference: Concept and pre-concept, in a sense of earlier concept, over-concept, "Über"-concept. I will come back to that in a minute. If there is something that I have been trying to do in my own work all these years and I am still trying to do, is about the definition of what architecture is.
I think architecture by no means has a finite meaning. And architecture has been used by other disciplines in order to structure their own discourse. Often, architecture has been associated with the notion of stability, of solidity, of hierarchy - you know the expressions: "the foundations of society" or "the structure of the law", or "being the architect of a policy ". But people have looked at architecture as something that could give permanence to things which are impermanent. Of course, my contention is very different. I would say that architecture cannot be separated from what happens in it. And what happens in it is by definition transient, architecture is constantly destabilized, as destabilization needs stable surroundings to begin to operate. Hence, the concept of architecture, or the "Grund"-concept or the "base"-concept -I do not know how to translate it in English- has to do with... let me try to give you an example about "basic concept" versus "general concept" in architecture: The "plan libre" in French -you know the Le Corbusier's idea of the dialectic between horizontal movement and vertical columns-, this is a concept. I could say also the "spiral ramp" defining a central space at the Guggenheim in New York, this is a concept. But before that you may have "Grundbegriffe", namely the fact that architecture can be defined as space, event and movement. This is even before devising specific architectural concepts. What I have tried to do in our work is to use the projects we do in our office as a mode of exploration, trying to understand this redefinition of what architecture might be. Of course it is not easy, because generally people want architecture to be the representation of certainty, they want architecture to be identity branding. And they do not like when you tell them "yes", it is going to work for a while, but do not believe in it forever! There is something which I would call in French "le dictionnaire des idées reçues" - "the dictionary of the received ideas". Architects are filled with received ideas, architecture has to be good, nice to people, has to be solid, has to be beautiful and so on. No, that is not the way it is.

Beyond communication

Liliana Gómez: With the paradigm shift by popular culture or mass culture [10], you also mention the event-city -I mean the term "event city"- the role of images and the visual surface are radically changed [11]. Especially in architectural, urban strategies, the image will define a quite important efficiency versus the concept realizing a translation into a communicational sphere. This as background, you bring into play a tool to recontextualize the architectural practice what you once called "dismantle", "defamiliarization" and "technologies and practices of defamiliarization" [12], in order to break the classical architectural canon and to mark a different discourse's position towards maybe plurality and the culture of difference. But "defamiliarization" could also be understood as a break of communication - not affirming the logics of difference but negating communication implying a non-communication. And my question now is: How do you delimit this?

Bernard Tschumi: First of all, defamiliarization only happens for a time. Culture has a means to absorb unfamiliar objects. It is very rare that something can stay unfamiliar. There are very few examples of buildings that are hated from the moment they are built through many generations. There is a building in New York called Two Columbus Plaza, which was done in the Sixties by Edward Durell Stone. It has little round holes on its façades and shows possibly some Islamic influence. It is not necessarily a great building but a very interesting one. Everybody hates it, when in reality it raises a lot of remarkable questions about surface treatment, envelope versus structure etc (...).
It was never absorbed as opposed to, say, the Centrepoint Tower also build in the Sixties in London, and hated in the Seventies and Eighties, but now rehabilitated. So the defamiliarization is something which normally gets absorbed. The question of communication is trickier, because: What do you want to communicate? What do we communicate? And here, I feel uneasy about an architecture which tries to communicate. Does it communicate the power of the institution it represents? Does it communicate, like Disney-Architecture, fun and family? So, you see whenever architects have tried to use architecture as a form of communication, it has always been a carry-catcher of discourse, whether it was fascist, socialist or whatever. Ultimately, architecture has no meaning, it is only what you project on to it. A fascist building and a socialist building during a certain era looked the same. It was what society was, in which society it was in that was this projection. The same happens today. So, those readings, those perceptions are unbelievably transient. And therefore I do not necessarily think that it is the role of architecture to communicate. It may be the role of architecture indeed to be like a mirror. In other words to reflect what you are, in what society you are.

Architecture is cultural critique

Liliana Gómez: Going back again, to this early productive phase 1974-1978, to the Architectural Manifestoes [13]. There you explicitly outline a new sense of the political defining it through spatial and architectural logics. In this sense, you set a new frame for the relationship between the aesthetic and the political. Closely linked to the key-notion of use, you realize this relationship within your first built architecture Parc de la Villette [14] manifesting in both projects: Architecture is cultural critique. This is also what you have mentioned right now that it is not about communication. So could you outline if the critical notion of use intrinsically linked to the everyday life reflected a more "generational" context of those times? [15]. How do you describe that cultural critique is the intrinsic dimension of architecture? [16]

Bernard Tschumi: I like your question because it is touching upon a very current conversation at the moment - here on the East Coast in the world of ideas in some universities. And it is opposing two approaches to architecture, one which has been called "postcriticality", and another called "utopian realism". Let us first talk about why was there this movement calling itself "postcriticality". It is clear that the generation of some people like Frank Gehry, Peter Eisenman and even Aldo Rossi were not considering architecture ideologies as a given, they were questioning a number of received ideas. They were being critical of the institution of architecture, but they were critical essentially in formal terms, in compositional terms. Then came another generation, which I would say has more to do with my generation, with Rem Koolhaas, with Coop Himmelblau and a few others who were trying to address cultural and programmatic issues as opposed to that previous generation which was working only with an intrinsic and formal nature of architecture as opposed to an extrinsic and social one. So in both cases, there was a critical attitude. Then, and I simplify a little bit, another generation arrived and some of its members, mostly in the United States, started to try to define themselves in terms of a "postcritical". In other words, something that would be linked to everyday operations of architecture, which would be opportunist in the best sense by taking advantage of circumstances - in order to work without trying to refer to social or even formal critique. Of course, I still belong to those who are having an interest for an articulation with culture and society. And that is why another dialogue is happening right now with others disputing "postcriticality" and like Reinhold Martin, proposing the notion of "utopian realism" which is based on ideas, but at the same time grounded in reality. You should talk to Reinhold Martin here in New York who has been very articulated about it. How can the architect be simultaneously the inventor of new models while inserting them in reality and not in tabula rasa? And I think that is indeed one of our challenges.

Liliana Gómez: Yes, there come in the figure of "translation" and the counter-figure of "rotating"...

Bernard Tschumi: Absolutely. Whenever someone talks about rotating, I always ask myself if it rotates on one plane or of it rotates as a spiral...

Liliana Gómez: It is about an outer-orbital figure... I want to come back to the metaphor of "tops of mast" ("Mastbaumspitze") which is evoked by Hannah Arendt when she thought a bit about Benjamin's biography and work [17]. Conceiving the metaphor "tops of mast" of both seeing clearly and overlooking as ambiguous, the own discourse's position might be unperceived and overdetermined, the "lieu" and "milieu" from where one is thinking always comes into play for a position's configuration. Observing your trajectories, you are defining a likely dominant discourse's position that means thinking from here, from New York, from the debate's center at Columbia University. It might ask for a certain translation when operating in different cultural and political contexts, as you do, for example, with your project Museo do Arte Contempôraneo in São Paulo [18], taking into account exactly the already fragmented and unstable conditions. With your recent book Event Cities 3, you formulate dynamics between the concepts' generic dimension, and the specific context proposing a third category "content" as a kind of strategy of translation realized by their relational combination. I want to remind here of the counter-figure of "rotating", especially the centrifugal condition "being-in-the-orbital" involves the risk of overlooking the peripheral logics because of the inclusion's position. So, for an architectural, urban project: How to include or exclude and trans-late different cultural contexts and logics, preventing a tendency of the context's homogenization, mediating between the specific and the generic? How to conceive the tool or strategy of contradiction in a cultural context of schizophrenic contradictions? [19]

Bernard Tschumi: With the "context of schizophrenic contradictions", you are touching on one of the most difficult things about architecture and what constitutes "good" architecture. "Good" architecture, generally, is understood, and even when I try to do it, as something which will be exclusive, and by exclusive, I mean underplaying or removing all the things that are not central to the concept. In other words, in order to make a statement you need to be able to say it in the clearest possible way. That is inevitably a reductive process. At the same time, if you want to be socially inclusive or contextually inclusive, I believe the only way to do it is in form of opposition, of tension and not in the form of a direct inclusion. So I can think of a discussion which is never taking place in architectural magazines, namely what is the relationship between the architectural object that they are presenting and what is next to it. I would love to have a special issue of a magazine in which they talk only about the interstices between what is new and what exists. The magazines even did not want to publish images with people in it - because this in-between is really the place of the inclusion, it is not the architecture itself, the architecture cannot be everything. I will give you an example which struck me at the time. When I finished the first buildings at the Parc de la Villette, all the magazines wanted publish it, and they always wanted to publish those red buildings as pieces of sculpture all alone, and never show the derelict buildings next to mine: A 19 th century market hall or a mid- 20 th century office tower. When in reality the project was really about that dialogue and those tensions. Because somehow, again, the "dictionary of received ideas of architecture" is about architects making shapes. So, how do you change the view of your own discipline? The paradox is that what justifies our existence is often actually just an appearance and pretence.

Stating the state of Architecture

Liliana Gómez: O.K. Last question: Recently and also almost programmatically with the theoretical counter-project: Questioning Ground Zero [20] where you expose the ambiguous logics of how the project Ground Zero in New York is conceived and put into realization, and with the project The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21 st century [21] where you directly propose a kind of architectural manifesto which is signed by several actors involved with architecture as a critique to the recent US American history when the war on Iraq started, you outline a critical position from where the figure of the architect as an intellectual and as a translator will be brought back into play - between cultural difference and different uses of space. You propose a change of architectural thinking and practice to a much more political dimension. About this state of architecture: Using manifestoes as a statement, could architecture be a lieu for a reclaiming? You bring in a kind of agenda for politics of translations: The architect as an intellectual. How to define his political roles or his roles in relation to the aesthetic today?

Bernard Tschumi: The Ground Zero phenomena was obsessive for so many of us here in New York, we saw it directly from our window few hundred meters away... but also, of course, because we are architects, and we like the city and suffer to see it brutalized. But it also forced us to try to understand how we operate. And it was interesting to see how ideological the architectural debate became. Any work that tried to be objective and analytical and comparative -by comparative, I mean making comparisons "trans-", analysis in history or nations- was pushed aside by pure ideology initiated by the politicians and even the media. And the project that was finally selected, was the most ideological project of them all. Architecture, instead of being a tool for thinking, became a tool for believing. And as I always thought that one of the most extraordinary things about architecture is that it is a way of thinking. We are confronted with the whole series of facts and information and we have to bring them together and give some coherence to them, even if they are incoherent. Alternatively, we at least have to stage incoherence in a comprehensible manner. This role of architecture as a form of thinking has been increasingly dismissed in certain political contexts. In the case of Ground Zero, ideology replaced thinking with religious patriotism, together with commercialism. Interestingly enough, at Ground Zero they never found a way to make them agree with one another. You would have thought that in America ideology and commercialism could work together. Not always. It is what one used to call the "internal contradictions of the system". What I tried to do with some of my students at Columbia was analytical, approaching it looking at different alternatives: What were the possible scenarios that one could envisage. It has nothing to do with form, it has nothing to do with what it looked like, but what were the potential options, starting programmatically and not formally, with their respective social, cultural and political implications.

Liliana Gómez: So that is then your strategy to deal with the modernity's ambiguity we are living in and the paradox of architecture that we are practicing as architects from the beginning of doing architecture.

Bernard Tschumi: Yes. Amusingly enough, one of the first articles I ever wrote was called the Paradox of Architecture and at the time I emphasized the difference between concept and experience [22]. I often have played this sort of dialectic, it is maybe my form of thinking, between conceptual mathematical precision and social constraints. The articulation in architecture between the objective and the subjective is one of the least understood dimension of what we do. Maybe, it is the effect that architecture deals with ideas but at the same time it also deals with material, and a mathematician generally does not deal with materiality. So, that is what makes architecture for me so fascinating.

Liliana Gómez: And there is laying then the dimension of cultural critique...

Bernard Tschumi: Yes.

Liliana Gómez: So, then we are coming back to "de-", "dis-", "ex-" where exactly the dismantling is present. We should ask for dismantling especially when questioning Ground Zero where we have to see that the ideological dimension is so strongly involved in order to find what you also called the search for an objective knowledge, maybe, and to formulate a critique.

Bernard Tschumi: Yes. And architecture can be a tool thought as an objective critique. But relatively few people use it. But is has that capability.

Liliana Gómez: O.K. Bernard Tschumi...

Bernard Tschumi: Thanks. You know, I quite liked how your questions have been articulated. They can be the beginning of a project, you can write a book on that....

Liliana Gómez: So, puntocero magazine, and especially me, we like to thank you for that conversation. [23]



notes:
[1] Bernard Tschumi, The Manhattan Transcripts, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 7.
[2] Bernard Tschumi, De-, Dis, Ex-, in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, p. 225.
[3] editorial, in: puntocero magazine, No. 0, Sept.04/February 05, Berlin.
[4] The mentioned text about the "trans-" and "rotation" was the invitation for the interview sent to Bernard Tschumi as conceptual frame before the realization of this conversation.
[5] Bernard Tschumi, Event Cities 3. Concept vs. Context vs. Content , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004
[6] see Reinhart Koselleck, Werner Conze, Otto Brunner (ed.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1972. And, Karlheinz Barck (ed.), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, Stuttgart, Weimar, 2000.
[7] Karlheinz Barck, Ästhetik, Geschichte der Künste, Begriffsgeschichte. Zur Konzeption eines "Historischen Wörterbuchs ästhetischer Grundbegriffe" , in: Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. Studien zu einem historischen Wörterbuch, Akademie-Verlag, Berlin, 1990.
[8] Michel Foucault, Archéologie du Savoir, Paris, 1969.
[9] Bernard Tschumi (ed.), Index of Architecture, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2003.
[10] [keynote 1] In the work Advertisements for Architecture (1976/1977), Bernard Tschumi tried to translate the new architecture's conditions into the language of mass media and into the logics of the reproducible -like the form of magazine- using the advertisements as surface where image and architecture meet for a greater public. In this sense, he transformed precisely those new conditions into an aesthetic thinking, diagnosing from there a dominant visual perception of architecture, and simultaneously, advertising architecture's production as the process of architecture towards theoretical concepts.
[11] see Bernard Tschumi, Event-Cities (Praxis), The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, and Bernard Tschumi, Spaces and Events (1984-1994), in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994,, and Bernard Tschumi, Manhattan Transcripts (1978), Architectural Design, Great Britain, 1981.
[12] Bernard Tschumi, Six Concepts (1991), in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994.
[13] Bernard Tschumi, Architectural Manifestoes I, (exhibition 8-28 February), Artist's Space, New York, April 1978, and Architectural Manifestoes II, Architectural Association, London, 1979.
[14] Bernard Tschumi Architects, Parc de la Villette, realized project at Paris, 1982-1997.
[15] [keynote 2] Especially the notion of desire, which Bernard Tschumi brought into play, inscribes itself into a context of the Collège de Sociologie around Georges Bataille - archeologically spoken - like the interest for the sacred, and the everyday life, and the notion of limit. In his early work Manhattan Transcripts (1976-1981), Bernard Tschumi developed a kind of ethnographic approach to urban spaces using a sui generis language of notation.
[16] [keynote 3] With the essays' collection Disjunctions (1975-1990), Bernard Tschumi mainly set a conceptual frame outlining series of methods to delimit architecture from just physical manifestation, explicitly he designed the lieu for a critique, in a much wider sense then other disciplines' practices do, like history of arts for example. Within these essays he did not only define an architecture's theoretical dimension, but he formulated his own "rules" which have been made visible lately by his architectural practice. In this sense, he created a kind of "toolbox" which demands an operation of translation towards architectural practice.
[17] Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, in: Men in Dark Times, Cape, London, 1970.
[18] see Bernard Tschumi, São Paulo, Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001, in: Event Cities 3. Concepts vs. Context vs. Content , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004.
[19] [keynote 4] Considering Bernard Tschumi's early works, especially notions like "paradox", "contradiction" and "transgression" characterize his preoccupation about architecture. I would like to stress this approach in order to define another modernity, by criticizing the classical rational philosophical thinking and introducing a kind of "irrational rationality". Taking into account the present context, i.e. fragmentation and dispersal fragments describing the new generic urban dimensions which put into question the modernity's paradigm in the traditional sense of progress, it is possible to observe that from there different strategies of dealing with that paradox in architecture might be open up. In this sense, his work could be read as a constant movement and positioning within the architecture's paradox and modernity's ambiguity. Bernard Tschumi once proposed: "celebrate fragmentation by celebrating the culture of differences, by accelerating and intensifying the loss of certainty, of center, of history", Six Concepts (1991), in: Architecture and Disjunction , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994, p. 237.
[20] Bernard Tschumi, New York, Tri-Towers of Babel: Questioning Ground Zero, 2002, in: Event Cities 3. Concepts vs. Context vs. Content , The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2004.
[21] Bernard Tschumi, Irene Cheng (ed.), The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21 rst century, The Monacelli Press, New York, 2003.
[22] Bernard Tschumi, The Architectural Paradox (1975-1976), in: Architecture and Disjunction, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1994.
[23] [keynote 5] After the conversation was finish, Bernard Tschumi added: "[...] 'for an architect the earth is flat'. And so I was discussing with people whether this was the 'Begriff' or the 'Grundbegriff'. In other words, that in architecture there are certain things which are crucial in terms of the development of the discipline itself. And this notion of the 'genealogy of concept' is very rarely talked about. Again, the approach these days is highly consumeristic, the way you work is apprehended, is purely on what it looks like, never on what it does. [...] But it is very much of the current conversation...".


Liliana Gómez studied architecture and philosophy and lives in Berlin. Actually she realizes a research project about discourses and models of theory of the Latin American Megacity in Berlin, Bogotá and São Paulo. She is editor of puntocero magazine.