parc de la villette context

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Parc de la Villette, ParisBernard Tschumi designer

J. Daniel Pugh LARC 263November 16, 2004

The Context Paper

This paper is written to help people know Bernard Tschumi and how he came to bethe designer for one of the few remaining large sites available within the city of Paris,

which became the Parc de le Villette. This is his story.BACKGROUND OF THE LANDSCAPE

Parc de le Villetteis sited on the former location of the Paris slaughterhouses

(Tschumi, Tschumi 32),and has a total area of 125 acres. The parc encompasses 186,000sq.ft. of restaurants, art workshops, music pavilions, recreation facilities and gardens, as

well as 70,000 sq.ft of galleries and bridges and 70 acres of landscaping.BACKGROUND OF THE DESIGNER

Bernard Tscumi spent half of his childhood in Lausanne, Switzerland and half in

Paris, France due to the fact that his mother was French and his father was Swiss. Hisfather studied architecture in Paris, and at the end of WWII he set up the School of

Architecture of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne. Because Tscumi spent so muchtime in both Lausanne and Paris, he felt that he was not limited to having only onenationality. As an adult he enjoyed living in New York because he felt there was no such

thing as nationality there.RELATING THE DESIGN TO THE DESIGNERS LIFE

Tschumi spent the formative years from childhood to adulthood living in apartments

within cities. Because he never lived in a house or in the country, he is very much of thecity, a world he knows very well.

THE SITE AS A PRODUCT OF THE DESIGNERS AGENDA

Tschumiwas not particularly interested in either the real or virtual worlds, separately,but he was attracted to the tension between those two worlds. He felt that when the real

and the virtual worlds come together, tension is created and the potential for designbegins. (Tschumi, Tschumi 23)

In 1982 Tschumi wanted to test his ideas in competitions with other architects, and heentered the competition for the design of the Parc de le Villette against 470 otherdesigners. Up to this point, he believed his architecture would be purely theoretical.

However, he surprised himself and won the competition, the first he ever entered. Suchan unexpected victory was equivalent to winning the Kentucky Derby without ever

having raced a horse before! (Tschumi, Tschumi 32)


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In Tschumis mind the Parc de leVillette was not a park but a new type of

city. Despite the fact that he started with anold industrial site, he decided that his design

would not be contextualnor would it

recreate or refer to things from the old site.Instead, he was starting from apure

concept, and for inspiration he looked atgeneral concepts of large organizations and

how they fit into the city of Paris. Aftertesting the superimpositions of abstractconcepts about organization, he decided the

point-grid system worked best and that theconcept of the discontinuous city would be

the starting point for his design of the parc.(Tschumi, Tschumi 32,44)

When Tschumi first made his design presentation to President Mitterand, he brought

four park designs with him: First was the 18th century park at Versailles; second was the19th century park of Les Buttes-Chaumont in Paris; third was a 20th century park,

Brazilia, under construction; and fourth he presented La Villette as the new 21st centurypark. (Tschumi, Tschumi 45)Tschumis design of the Parc de la Villette isanticontextual, has no relation to its surroundings, and subverts borders on which

context depends. (Lissarrague vi)WhileTschumi had resisted the

idea ofcontextualismfor Parc de leVillette,it does work well within itscontext. The axis of the 19th Century

cast-iron market hall is not quiteperpendicular to the canal, and this

allows the north-south gallery to travelslowly from the west to the east andmove across the grid of the folies. The

folies run precisely parallel to the canaland the line of movement challenges

the architecture. This is not anaesthetic choice but one following thelogic of Tschumis design. Im not

interested in composition, but inmontage, he explained. (Tschumi,

Tschumi 50)I think the park worksvery well functionally and visuallywith the other projects built around the

site, such as Cit de la Musique byChristian de Portzamparc, the Zenith,

and the Museum of Science andTechnology. The site is so charged

Where the Parc meets the built world


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with different approaches to design. I think our folies provide a way to punctuate andarticulate the whole. (Tschumi, Tschumi 51)

Tschumi seemed to enjoy the various reactions his design elicits: Here nobodyknows what that image or theme is. People do react to the park, though. They like it or

hate it, although most dont understand it. And thats fine with me, because I dont want

it to be so easy to understand. I want it to be used as a mirror of their questions.(Tschumi, Tschumi 51)CONTEXT OF OTHER WORKS CREATED BY THE DESIGNER

As stated earlier, Parc de le Villette was Tschumis first competition. Up to this point

he had been teaching architectural theory. Now he wanted to test his theories againstother designers. The Parc de le Villette competition was particularly difficult to grasp formany of the competitors, but Tschumi did not see it that way because he found it more

challenging to work on difficult projects than on easy ones. (Tschumi, Tschumi 19)Tschumis first projects, Rituals, explore the relations between space, movement,

and action. His second project types draw on his first works with movement. He uses arandomly curved vector crossing through a grid; a vector as a landscape; vector asinfrastructure and vectors that go against normative contexts. His third works, voids

and solids, explore the architectural device of carving into solids to create void spaces.His fourth project types encourage activation of the void created. He does this by

increasing the intensity of the space with public activities. Tschumis fifth project type isthe envelope. It is the common denominator of all architecture, the enclosure (Tschumi,Event 12)

EVENTS OF THE PERIOD THAT MAY HAVE INFLUENCED THE DESIGN

It took ten years for Tschumis ideas to become the architectural plans he submittedto the Parc de Villette Competition in 1983. The events during his time in London

between 1970 and 1976 were formative to the design he submitted in 1983, moreformative than the events of 1983. In 1970 he began teaching at the Architectural

Association in London and had the opportunity to meet many young architects that ten

years later would collectively be developing a new architecturalsensibility. It was a very dynamic time for these designers.

(Tschumi, Tschumi 16)In 1976 Tschumi gave his students at the Architectural

Association a project: They were to take James JoycesFinnegansWake and design a landscape plan from the text. Each studentwas assigned a point on a grid of Covent Garden in London,

Tschumis way of organizing the students to get a lot of workdone. This project was named Joyces Garden and would be one

of the concepts used for Parc de le Villette seven years later.(Tschumi, Tschumi 44)

In 1976 Tschumi was doing some research called the Screenplays or theManhattanTranscripts in which he was experimenting with movement, events and the systems of

points, lines and surfaces. He was testing ideas on movements and the dynamic of eventsand activity, and this became his deciding strategy to enter the competition for Parc de leVillette and use multiple devices to organize complexity.

Joyces Garden with point grid


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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF THE PERIOD

Large public projects in France tend to have centralized decision making;

consequently, a politician with real power does not have to get approval from acommittee or governing body. That is why President Mitterand was able to secure 300

million dollars for the construction of Parc de le Villette. While there were debates,arguments and newspaper editorials about the project, none of this was as difficult as theprocess of getting a comparably sized project completed in the United States. (Tschumi,

Tschumi 24)STATE OF THE FINE AND APPLIED ARTS

The competition for the Parc de la Villette was the first of the international

architectural competitions in Paris in the 1980s, all of which were part of a majorcultural and political effort to restructure entire areas of the French capital, according to

Bernard Tschumi. (Kipnis 125)INFLUENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY

During a 1997 interview Bernard Tschumi indicated, Architects will begin to do a

lot of work in terms of building technology. This is something I refer to as glue andmicrochips. Of course, Im referring to two technologies here: building technology and

computer technology. These two things together will have far more impact than anythingabout form. I think that it is here that a fascination exists, and I think we are in a veryexciting period. I think that in these ways architecture is still a young discipline, with a

long way to go. (Tschumi, Tschumi 23)SENSIBILITIES & FINANCES OF THE CLIENT

Bernard Tscumis client was the French Government, and in 1982 it was not known ifthe government had budgeted money for the project. The government was also about tochange. The project started under Mitterand, but in 1986 a new government from the

right came to power and nearly ended the project. This political volatility would lastthrough most of the next twelve years of the parcs construction. At times, the projectwould stop for six months before more funding could be found. (Tschumi, Tschumi 45)

POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO HISTORIC PRECEDENTSConcepts from other disciplines, film or philosophy were introduced at this

competition, and Tschumi intentionally did not want to represent an architecturalheritage. His decision upset many people, including the architectural establishment. TheFrench press was also quite critical, but his design did get supportive coverage from the

international media. (Tschumi, Tschumi 48)Peter Eisenman said, It is the differencebetween that was being sought. Atopia is literally no place or without place. In order

to understand the nature of this displacement, the nature of traditional place must bedefined. The concept of urban place has been associated with a bounded or framedunitary condition of presence. Unlike the Japanese conception ofma as space between

and mu as no place, both of which imply a very real condition of a presence in a

condition of absence, Western conceptions of place are always presence bounded as wellas being grounded to a specific location. (Kipnis 135)Tschumi summarized the intent and fulfillment of his design by saying, Our project

is motivated by the most constructive principle within the legitimate history of

architecture, by which new programmatic developments and inspirations result in newtypologies. Our ambition is to create a new model in which program, form and ideology

all play integral roles. (Barzilay 38)


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During the 19th century Frederick Law Olmsted brought a representation of thenatural world to cities. In the 20th century parks are no longer separate from the city

replications of nature, dropped into an urban world. The park for the 21st century isintegrated within the functions of the city, and it needs to complement the vision of the

city so that the city will exist within the park and embrace urban reality. (Lissarrague 1)Conclusion

In French, La Villette means little city. Through the force of his revolutionary

design, Tschumi was able to anticipate the future of Paris in his gift to the citythe Parcde le Villette.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Tschumi, Bernard. Bernard Tschumi / edited and photographed by Yukio Futugawa.

Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1997.

Kipnis, Jeffrey and Thomas Leeser, eds. Chora L works: Jacques Derrida and PeterEisenman. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997.

Barzilay, Marianne, Catherine Hayward, and Lucette Lombard-Valentino. LInventiondup arc. Paris: Graphite Editions, 1984.

Tschumi, Bernard. Event-cities 2 / Bernard Tschumi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.

Lissarrague, Jacques. La Cite des sciences et de lindustrie, Paris-La Villette. Paris:Electra Moniteur, 1988.

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