Architecture Bachelors Dissertation

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PROMENADE IN ARCHITECTURE: OUR PERCEPTION OF REALITY BEYOND THE FRAME | SCARLETT HESSIAN | DISSERTATION | CENTRAL SAINT MARTINS

Beyond The Frame; Our Perception Of Reality: The Importance Of The Promenade In Architecture.

Scarlett Hessian Dissertation 16th April 2013 BA (Honours): Architecture: Spaces & Objects Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design

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Contents Introduction

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Tschumi: ‘There is no space without event’ (Tschumi, 1996,139)

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Framing: ‘All sequences are cumulative’ (Tschumi, 1996, 166)

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Voyeurism: ‘All the world’s a stage’ (Shakespeare - Cliffsnotes, 2013)

20 - 25

Baudelaire’s closed window: an introduction to passive space

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Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette: passive space in architecture

32 - 41

Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Image Iist

47 - 48

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‘Can one attempt to make a contribution to architectural discourse by relentlessly stating that there is no space without event, no architecture without program?’ (Tschumi, 1996, 139)

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Introduction

‘The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. He has the need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, and the need to gather these perceptions in a “World”’ (Stevens, 2007, 19).

This comment by the French theorist, Henri Lefebvre, demands that a discussion be opened up about how architecture should reflect humanity’s need to move. I aim to argue that the promenade, focusing on Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, (1929), and Bernard Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts (1976-1981) and his Parc de la Villette (1987), allow spaces for the viewer to wander.

In order to emphasize our inherent desire to move, I will show how our brains interpret a single frame by looking at space in the frame and beyond the frame. We also automatically analyse the frame temporally, as we look back or forward in time, thereby creating a narrative or story. The frame is therefore active, in which the protagonist depicted should be spoken about using a language of movement.

In order to discuss the active space that is created when we frame something, it is important to highlight how this creates a window for us to peer into, or out of. By analysing several impressionist paintings, as well as the work of Edward Hopper, I show how there is a common theme of voyeurism. When I link my ideas that we have a desire to travel, and have a desire to be voyeurs, the feelings that are evoked are of absence, a nostalgic reflection of the past, and the need for mobility in modernity.

When applied to architecture, a promenade also demands that we look beyond the frame in much the same way as a painting does, as events occur by our movement through a space. In the final chapter of my essay, I discuss how the promenade can have a passive effect on us, thereby doing away with feelings of nostalgia and absence by the activity of moving. I will draw on the nihilistic comments and films of Wim Wenders, and argue that this sense of nihilism, when applied to architecture, asks the viewer to participate but not question why. I show that this can be discussed in opposition to voyeurism, which attempts to make sense of the city. I am, therefore, interested in how we can become passive participants, instead of active voyeurs. Perhaps for architecture to have a passive effect, it must first remove any display of program? Can the promenade in architecture be an important platform for self-reflection, allowing us to look beyond the frame, and perceive an introspective reality of ourselves?

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Tschumi: ‘There is no space without event’ (Tschumi, 1996,139)

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Hobo on Tracks Image from Novel ‘ Train Dreams’

by Denis Johnson.

2012

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The film director, Wim Wenders, in a speech given in 1982 said that: ‘People’s primary requirement is that some kind of coherence be provided. Stories give people the feeling [of] meaning, that there is ultimately an order lurking behind the incredible confusion of appearances and phenomena that surrounds them. This order is what people require more than anything else’ (Graf, 2002, 2).

Wim Wenders discusses the idea that human beings have a natural desire to impose narrative on events, in order to find coherence in life. Applying this idea of story and coherence to architecture, this immediately asks the question of: How can the architect or designer leave his mark in order to express his vision?

How can he express his program in a way that can be interpreted?

One way that Le Corbusier imposes story on architecture is through his portrayal of the Villa Savoye in a set of photographs: ‘[A] table is set for tea’ (Mical,2005,109) and ‘in the sill of the window […] we find a hat, a pair of sunglasses, a little package (cigarettes?) and a lighter’ (Colomina, 1992, 100).

These signifiers of a lived-in home arise when we ask ourselves who lives here; a story has developed.

Wim Wenders had this realization of the importance of stories when he shot his first film, Silver City, (1969) overlooking some train tracks:

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Villa Savoye, View of the entrance hall, 1992 Colomina

‘I knew the train schedule […] began filming two minutes before one was due, and everything seemed to be exactly as it had been in all the other shots. Except that two minutes later someone ran into the shot from the right, jumped over the tracks just a couple of yards in front of the camera, and ran out of the left edge of the frame. The moment he disappeared […] the train thundered into the picture […] This tiny “action” – man crosses tracks ahead of train – signals the beginning of a “story”’ (Hoffman, 1992, 51-2).

This was a profound moment for Wenders, for previously he had only sought to capture the mundane beauty of tranquil landscape, having been a landscape painter. Now he understood life differently, in which events and actions occur that have causes from the past, and which will have effects in the future; a narrative of time. Walter Benjamin said that: “To live is to leave traces” (Colomina, 1992, 74). The crack in a stone pavement, the scratches on a bicycle, or just the invisible traces that mark in people’s minds as memories, are all traces that may one day become stories. Wenders asks himself:

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Villa Savoye, View of the kitchen 1992 Colomina

‘What is wrong with the man? Is he being followed? Does he want to kill himself? Why is he in such a hurry?’ (Hoffman,1992, 52).

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In the same way, we might ask similar questions of Le Corbusier’s photos of the Villa Savoye: How do you orientate through this house? Who left the door open? Is there someone here? There is an intrigue that leaves you wanting to see the next scene, the next image beyond the still image you are being shown. Within these photographs, the architecture becomes a backdrop for the event of nostalgic reflection, as we question the absence of people, thus inventing story.

Bernard Tschumi’s rhetorical maxim emphasises this importance of story in architecture: ‘Can one attempt to make a contribution to architectural discourse by relentlessly stating that there is no space without [an] event, no architecture without [a] program?’ (Tschumi, 1996, 139).

For Tschumi, it seems that a building or space does not exist without the event of a person travelling through it, the active subject, as well as an architectural form, or program, which, like Le Corbusier’s signifiers, suggests a story. Tschumi, like Wenders, is saying that narratives are evoked by events in time.

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Villa Savoye January 2008 Jim Stoddart

However, Tschumi offers up an alternative doctrine to this rigid rhetorical maxim. He argues against something needing a beginning or end, thereby opposing the idea that we need coherence in life, when he quotes Jean Luc Godard: ‘”Surely you agree, Mr Architect, that buildings should have a base, a middle and a top?”

[The Architect replies] “Yes, but not necessarily in that order”’ (Tschumi, 1996, 166).

Of course, a building will always have a base, middle, and top, but to question this classical use of language altogether, expresses a playfulness that I will later show is evident in his Parc de la Villette. Firstly, however, it is important to analyse what Tschumi means when he says that: ‘Before architecture […] comes the movements of bodies in space.’ (Cresswell, 2012, 51).

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Villa Savoye January 2008 Jim Stoddart

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Villa Savoye View of the roof garden 1992 Colomina

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Kings of the Road 1976 Film still Wim Wenders

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Framing: ‘All sequences are cumulative’ (Tschumi, 1996, 166)

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Paris Texas 1984 Wim Wenders

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Alice in the Cities 1974 Wim Wenders

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In this chapter, I discuss our inherent desire for movement, which I touched on earlier with Lefebvre’s comment that Man ‘has the need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, and the need to gather these perceptions in a “World”’ (Stevens, 2007, 19). To understand what Tschumi means by the importance he places on movement before architecture, it is interesting to look at how, even in the single frame of a painting, there is a story of movement similar to Le Corbusier’s photographs of Villa Savoye.

Juhani Pallasmaa discusses framing when he says that: ‘A masterful artist makes the viewer think, see and experience other things than what he/she is actually being exposed to. The lines of Piet Mondrian’s diagonal paintings that meet beyond the edges of the canvas make the viewer aware of the space outside the painting’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, 35).

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Paintings and photographs offer us a snapshot of life. Thus, when a single frame is portrayed, there are automatically things that are absent in the geography of “space outside the painting”. Therefore, paintings can activate the passive spaces beyond the scene using signifiers. Using Le Corbusier’s photo as an example, the objects portrayed such as the lighter, as well the presence of ‘the black door ajar’ (Mical, 2005, 109), are signifiers of absence that highlight the building as more than just a structure; it is a lived in home in stasis, in which there are: ‘[V]ectors of directional arrows […] movements [of] mobilized territories; mappings of practiced places’ (Bruno, 2002, 57).

The absence of man, therefore, is emphasised by the allusion to the kinetics of the space; the “event” that someone has passed through the room. The signifiers of the active space show the space to be a functional promenade. We have created a sequence and a story, and we have done this when our eye wanders through the image, in which each previous frame influences our next frame. This is an idea that the Russian film director, Eisenstein, posits, when he asks the question: ‘What comprises the dynamic effect of a painting?’ (Eisenstein, 1929, 50). He answers this question by demonstrating this idea of a sequence:

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‘The eye follows the direction of an element in the painting. It retains a visual impression, which then collides with the impression derived from following the direction of a second element. The conflict of these directions forms the dynamic effect in apprehending the whole…’ (Eisenstein, 1929, 50).

The word conflict is interesting because it suggests a feeling of unease. Perhaps this is the unease of our attempts to find coherent stories in a single frame. It might be that this conflict represents the difficulty our memory has at retaining events, placing them in the correct library for later on, or putting them in a place that will be emptied of its memories in the short term. This is what Magritte’s surreal series of paintings - Man Reading a Newspaper (1928) – capture; the way in which our minds accumulate frames within a sequence, and through memory, sometimes forgetting images:

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Piet Mondrian

10.i - Lozenge Composition: Red, Gray, Blue & Yellow, 1924 10.ii - Lozenge Composition: Light Color planes with gray lines, 1919 10.iii - Lozenge Composition: Yellow, Black, Blue, Red & Gray, 1924 10.iv - Lozenge Composition with four yellow lines, 1924

‘Where within, a man sits uneventfully by the window, only to disappear; his conspicuous absence repeated in each of the remaining three frames’ (Mical, 2005,108).

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Whether or not Magritte was attempting to allude to the fact that our mind is capable of forgetting, he is certainly demonstrating what Tschumi means when he says: ‘All sequences are cumulative. Their “frames” derive significance from juxtaposition. They establish memory – of the preceding frame, of the course of events. To experience and to follow an architectural sequence is to reflect upon events in order to place them into a successive whole’ (Tschumi, 1996, 166-7).

Once again, the idea of coherence is evident, as we attempt to understand events and “place them into a successive whole”. We might think of the “architectural sequence” as simply the architectural promenade, in which our individual movement determines how we “establish memory”. Tschumi seems more positive than Eisenstein about how we perceive frames, suggesting they have “significance” rather than “conflict”. They agree on one idea though, that we naturally create sequences.

From this observation that when looking at a single frame we form sequences, we can conclude that the movement of the eye reflects our human instinct to travel and form new opinions, as expressed by Lefebvre. Indeed, this idea of the journeying man was something that the Impressionists were trying to portray within their paintings, and that the 19th century French poet, Baudelaire, describes as a flaneur: ‘The flaneur moves through the labyrinthine streets and hidden spaces of the city, partaking of its attractions and fearful pleasures, but remaining somehow detached and apart from it’ (Sunderland, 2011).

In this sense, the French painters, such as Manet and Degas, were flanuers capturing other flanuers, detaching themselves from life but also partaking in the pleasures of others. Manet’s Place de la Concorde (1875) depicts a flanuer walking with his children, capturing the scale of the city, with the majority of the painting depicting, with ochre oil paint, the gravelled place that the flaneur walks through. The main character of the painting does not look at his children, nor the present situation he is in, but at someone beyond the boundaries of the painting, alerting the viewer to a wider context external to the scene; the permanently moving city. Juhani Pallasmaa reinforces this idea: ‘The arbitrary framing of subjects in Impressionist paintings strengthens the sense of the real and brings the world and life, continuing beyond the boundaries of framing, into the consciousness of the observer’ (Pallasmaa, 2001, 35).

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Man Reading a Newspaper 1928 Rene Magritte

This supports my idea that we have an instinct to move, when we look beyond the frame in order to discover new perceptions of reality, thereby suggesting the importance of the architectural promenade.

Framing, therefore, draws attention to the absence of things by providing signifiers of absence. Framing also depicts an idea of memory, when we analyse the route our eyes take to create sequences - as Magritte’s Man Reading a Newspaper (1928) suggests. In the next chapter, i will explain how framing can also provide signifiers that reflect our voyeuristic desire to be spectators, in which our desire to gaze at one another is highlighted.

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The Flaneur n.d.

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Buena Vista Social Club 1997 Wim Wenders

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Place de la Concorde 1875 Manet

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Voyeurism: ‘All the world’s a stage’ (Shakespeare - Cliffsnotes, 2013)

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Night Windows 1928 Edward Hopper

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Mary Cassatt’s Woman in Black at The Opera (1879) goes further than Manet’s Place de la Concorde (1875), in that it emphasises the importance of not just seeing, but being seen – the idea of society as the spectacle – which was the pastime of many contemporary Parisians: ‘The developing consumer society appealed directly to the visual sense, and the “consumption of the eye” was a crucial element of the nineteenth-century commodification’ (Parsons, 2000, 21).

Mary Cassatt paints a woman glancing out of an opera box at the stage through binoculars, whilst leaning out of the balcony to get a better look. In the background, a man focuses his gaze on the woman in black through his binoculars, subverting the idea of the stage being the only spectacle, and emphasizing the idea of the activity of the people in the stalls and boxes as the other spectacle. The event of the stage becomes passive, as the event in the stalls becomes active. As Shakespeare said: ‘All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players… ’ (Shakespeare, As You Like It, act 2, scene 7,Cliffsnotes, 2013).

Shakespeare is using dramatic irony to break down the fourth wall of the stage, and asks the audience to look at themselves, not just the actors on stage.

Edward Hopper portrays this same theme of voyeuristic desire in his painting, Eleven A.M. (1926), in which: ‘[A] naked woman is staring fixedly at the courtyard from an open window, thus problematizing the entire issue of voyeurism ’ (Palassmaa, 2001, 169).

Juhani believes this problematizes the issue of voyeurism because it subverts the idea that: ‘The inside is always definitely somebody’s territory, whereas the outside is anonymous’ (Palassmaa, 2001, 169).

In other words, even if the nude woman in the painting is putting her body on display, we still feel as if we are invading her personal space. When looked at in this way, the painting reinforces the idea of gendered internal and external space that the architect Adolf Loos puts forward: ‘The exterior of the house […] should resemble a dinner jacket, a male mask; as the unified self, protected by a seamless façade, the exterior is masculine. The interior is the scene of sexuality and of reproduction, all the things that would divide the subject in the outside world’ (Colomina, 1992, 94).

One cannot deny that the internal space of Hopper’s depicted home is feminine, and indeed a “scene of sexuality” with the nude woman. Like Juhani, I believe the painting subverts this idea that space outside is male or “anonymous”. To agree with Loos, would be conforming to a sexist idea of the cloistered woman, unable to break free from her shackles of home life. If we are to take Le Corbusier’s belief that ‘the exterior is always an interior’ (Colomina, 1992, 67), we can deconstruct this idea of the male gaze and the cloistered woman, and de-gender the space beyond the bedroom. The naked woman is therefore, an active subject, not because of her body - a language that Loos would like us to take up, but because of a hinted-at “event” about to take place - her visible yearning to travel into the exterior space beyond the boundaries of the painting. Space beyond the frame, therefore, has the ability to deconstruct the male gaze of Mary Cassatt’s voyeur, and break down sexist interpretations of the home being a place for women to be shut away in.

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Woman in Black at the Opera 1879 Mary Cassatt

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Eleven A.M. 1926 Edward Hopper

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Le Corbusier, roof garden, Villa Savoie, Poissy, 1929-31 Thomas Mical

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Villa Savoye.

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Untitled 2011 Tiphaine.c

L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui.

“Une maison ce n’est pas une prison: l’aspect change a chaque pas.”

2005 Colomina

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Looking at Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, we can see the same desire to look beyond a single frame. Its design subtly glides you from the ground floor up a single continuous ramp that takes you from the beginning of the building to the end, allowing platforms for viewing the exterior context of the building, and the complete journey from start to finish; the viewer is invited to finish in the same environment from which they started, with the ramp starting outside, and ending on the roof terrace of the house. These feelings of unity and continuity are suggested by Christopher Taji: ‘A ramp provides gradual ascent from the pilotis, creating totally different sensations than those felt when climbing stairs. A staircase separates one floor from another: a ramp links them together’ (Taji, 2010).

By eliminating a stair case, it is as if the wall and the window of Edward Hopper’s painting is broken down, as we are invited to look outside, as well as in to the floors. This goes someway to presenting an architectural program that deconstructs form in the same way that Tschumi does when he says: “Surely you agree, Mr Architect, that buildings should have a base, a middle and a top?” [The Architect replies] “Yes, but not necessarily in that order”’ (Tschumi, 1996, 166).

To see the exterior as always an interior then, is asking us to look beyond the frame, in order to not be mere spectators like the man staring at the woman in black in Mary Cassatt’s painting, which has the effect of rendering us voyeurs. A ramp can provide a promenade from which we become active subjects, taking in the views of the exterior and interior in a continuous unified way. One should not ignore the fact that Le Corbusier might have taken into account the voyeuristic tendencies of human beings, however, as the Villa Savoye is located away from its neighbouring buildings in a large natural environment.

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Axonometric Villa Savoye circulation 2012

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Villa Savoye Floor Plans 2011

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Villa Savoye South & East Side Sections 2011

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Baudelaire’s closed window: an introduction to passive space

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Paris Texas 1984 Wim Wenders 27

Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts project is an attempt to record movement in a space, and use that as a basis to construct architecture. In this respect, it is the architectural epitome of his ideology that: “Before architecture […] comes the movements of bodies in space.” (Cresswell, 2012, 51).

For this project, Tschumi photographed the movement of people in the city of New York, and deciphered diagrammatic blueprints of movement in space. He explored the idea of how one event leads to the next - “all sequences are cumulative” - by studying a series of photographs in sequence and attempting to derive a formula to the movement of people in space. Tschumi is, therefore, interested in how architecture can make us nostalgic voyeurs of past experiences, in which past events, which leave traces, can have a direct impact on how we determine space today.

Tschumi’s attempt at trying to make events more significant, and thereby make sense of the city, follows on from the theory of psychogeography by the Situationists, a collective started in 1957. The body of work by the Situationists differs from Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts, in that they wanted to deliberately construct events, rather than just record the everyday. There are similarities with Tschumi, however, in their common desire for humans to be more than mere spectators of life, and become participants in everyday life. What underpins this similar desire is a belief that the city is ephemeral, or constantly changing, because of the advances in capitalism. This is reflected in Tschumi’s thinking that: ‘Architecture is constantly unstable, constantly on the verge of change’ (Tschumi, 1994, 20).

This idea that architecture is constantly unstable is another example of how Tschumi aims to break down the language of architecture. For him, it is not that there is no stability in a solid building; it is just that to talk of architecture, as stable, with a solidified program and solidified events, is to misrepresent the impact that people and their movement have on a space.

By investigating past movements, and attempting to derive some form from these movements, Tschumi suggests that it is possible to find coherence in life; there is space beyond the frame in which we can perceive reality through it. Tschumi reinforces the opinion of the Situationist, Andre Breton, who said that even a ‘banal event can be emotive’ (Mical, 2005, 222). However, when placed alongside his ideas of the ephemeral nature of architecture, Tschumi suggests that the city cannot be defined; it is beyond our language and, therefore, beyond our interpretations of how the active subject can find coherence in the chaos of life. If the active subject on the move cannot find coherence, by extension we need to use a new language: a language in which we are passive subjects. As Wim Wenders comments: ‘Perhaps at the end of every search the thing you’ve been looking for in other places you end up finding in yourself’ (Hoffman, 1996, 45-46).

This thought is reiterated by Baudelaire, when he discusses the window symbolically rather than functionally: ‘He who looks through an open window sees fewer things than he who looks through a closed window’ (Colomina, 1992, 107).

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own image 2013

These philosophical interpretations of the journey and window, begin to break down the essence of how we use language in much the same way as Tschumi does.

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Bringing my ideas back to a sense of story or narrative, Graf writes that, when ‘[a]nswering to the charge that his characters and his films seem to have aimless narrative trajectories’ (Graf, 2002,68), Wenders explains: ‘You’re right, they’re not going anywhere; or rather, its not important for them to arrive anywhere particular. What’s important is having the right “attitude”, to be moving. That’s your aim: to be on the road. I’m like that myself too; I prefer “travelling” to “arriving”’ (Graf, 2002, 68-69).

It is not about the beginning or end of the journey, but about the in-between spaces you encounter, and how these events help us to look into ourselves. Le Corbusier emphasises a similar passion for movement: ‘[Architecture] is appreciated while on the move, with ones feet […] while walking, moving from one place to another [...] A true architectural promenade [offers] constantly changing views, unexpected, [and] at times surprising’ (Bruno, 2002, 58).

Architecture is best when it is “constantly changing” and “unexpected”, in other words - unstable. When we travel and lose our sense of direction or coherence, we become passive narcissists, for as Wenders says: ‘A Narcissist is someone who cuts himself off from the world, preferring to see his own picture than to a picture of the world’ (Hoffman, 1996, 57).

Tschumi’s comment about the instability of architecture, therefore, questions the language that we use to talk about reality, in much the same way as the narcissistic protagonist in the novel by Sartre, Nausea (1938), says: ‘When you are living, nothing happens. The settings change; people come in and go out, that’s all. There are never any beginnings, days are tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, it is an endless, monotonous addition [...] That’s living. But when you tell about life, everything changes [...] events take place one-way and we recount them the opposite way’ (Graf, 2002, 60).

The protagonist discusses how we interpret reality, and how even when we attempt to apply form on a narrative, our narrative will always cease to reproduce the exact way in which things happened. What is needed, therefore, is an architecture that draws attention to our inability to impose form on something.

Bernard Tschumi describes The Manhattan Transcripts as: ‘An architectural interpretation of reality [...] neither real projects nor mere fantasies [...] Their implicit purpose had to do with the 20th-century city.’ (Tschumi, 2013).

Tschumi demonstrates the architectural need to see the twentieth century city through a new playful language that is in a kind of fantasy realm beyond our everyday reality. Perhaps this is why Cioffi, in a discussion of Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, quotes Dr. Philip McGraw as saying ‘there is no reality, only perception’ (Cioffi, 2012, 12), and according to Cioffi, ‘it is only by having this awareness [that] one can begin to fully understand la Villette’ (Cioffi, 2012, 14). Perhaps Tschumi’s mirrored sphere in la Villette is an example of him toying with our perceptions of space, by reflecting reality back at us, but distorting it on its surface.

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Parc Villette 2012 Christophe Cloud

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Parc Villette 2012 Christophe Cloud

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Manhattan Transcripts 1976-1981 Tschumi

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Ferris Wheel Armenia 2008 Wim Wenders

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Street Corner Butte, Montana 2003 Wim Wenders

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Open Air Screen Palermo 2007 Wim Wenders

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Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette: passive space in architecture

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Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, Paris, Follies and Galleries Isometrics 1986 Tschumi

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Follies n.d.

Bernard Tschumi Architects

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Parc de la Villette, Paris, 1982-1997 drawings/ renderings Bernard Tschumi Architects

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Parc de la Villette - Sculpture Moderne 2012 Randy Spiers

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What Tschumi creates in la Villette, is a space where visitors are led along paths that collide into others, allowing for the chance of unexpected encounters at points of junction. Roberto Cioffi draws attention to this lack of a linear story in la Villette when he says that: ‘A curved walkway threads its way through the park, intersecting the linear walks at various points. The Villette [...] cuts and ends abruptly, but always re-connects and never quite loses the “inherent logic” contained within its structural composition’ (Cioffi, 2012, 6).

This is much like the editing in the films of Eisenstein, where random images are spliced together to create a surreal effect on our conscious, changing the perception of what we are seeing, so that we form our own version of what we are being shown. With walkways intersecting walkways, Tschumi provides us with the sort of walkways that Wenders would like, where we have the: ‘[A]bility to just wander around and get lost [so that] you can end up in the strangest spots’ (Labare, 2013).

However, this inherent logic that Cioffi finds, in the paths, is broken down by the follies, which capture the essence of this otherworldly new language that Tschumi disseminates. His follies lack any sense of symbolism in their form or function. Instead, they are merely directional vectors of our perception of space, in that they pronounce an: ‘[E]xplicit rejection of authorship and meaning […] each observer will project his own meaning, looking to produce stimulation rather than closure’ (Cruickshank, 2012, 4).

Meaning is derived from the individual when the program is ambiguous, thus resulting in the story remaining unfinished. As Tschumi said himself: ‘[L]a Villette, aims to be an architecture that means nothing; an architecture of the signifier rather than the signified’ (Cruickshank, 2012, 4).

In other words, Tschumi’s follies allow us to be passive subjects in which, to take up and add to Sartre’s words, we ‘are living [because] nothing happens’ (Graf, 2002. 60). This reinforces Wim Wenders’s idea of the importance of travelling, rather than arriving; an architecture of the signifier, rather than the signified.

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Parc de la Villette, Paris 1983 Bernard Tschumi

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The follies in Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette have the same effect as children do in the films of Wim Wenders; they ‘represent an innocence of perception’ (Graf, 2002, 67). Indeed Wenders says himself: ‘In my films, children are present as the films own fantasy [that] the film would like to see with. A view of the world that isn’t opinionated [...] and only children really have that gaze [...] Like the little boy at the end of [his film] Kings Of The Road, sitting at the station, doing his homework.’

(Graf, 2002, 67).

Graf is stating here that, the boy does not have a predetermined perception of things, but purely accepts the fact of existence whilst he: ‘[S]imply remain[s] open to visual stimulation, to ordinary phenomena’ (Graf, 2002, 67).

Indeed, Wenders could be talking about the Follies when he says: ‘The great thing about seeing for me is what distinguishes it from thinking, namely that it doesn’t entail having an opinion [...] In seeing, you can come to a view of another person, an object, the world, that doesn’t imply an opinion [...] For me, seeing is immersing myself in the world’ (Graf, 2002, 67).

Perhaps it is not about learning any specific knowledge from life, by looking at past events in order to create possibilities for the future, but about experience, and in particular, satisfying the desire to experience life on the move. Hilary Weston comments that Travis in Wenders’ film, Paris Texas, is the embodiment of a journeying man, for his character speaks for us all when he shows a: ‘[D]esperate hunger for something you’ve never tasted […] the endless desire for a place you’ve been, mourning the absence of something never to be regained’ (Weston, 2012).

Weston is discussing the nostalgic feeling that we should reflect on our past in order to know how to live in the present and future. She also offers up Andre Breton’s definition of nostalgia: ‘“All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name”’ (Weston, 2012). It is important to recognize that Breton is more philosophical; his tone is melancholy, like Westons, but he is suggesting that he will never be able to define what this absent thing is. Like Tschumi’s follies, he seems to be offering up a language that implicitly denies the ability to capture and objectify existence.

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Axon 2011 Andre Knoll

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Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette is, therefore, setting a stage or platform for event to happen, rather than imposing a single narrative like Le Corbusier does in his photographs of Villa Savoye. This deconstruction of form is important because, ‘the only political act of which cinema [and architecture] is capable [of is] keeping the idea of change going’ (Hoffman, 1996, 53). For me, the Parc de la Villette is an entirely politically neutral space, sitting separately from the ideologies that are circulated by a museum and the Grande Hall that juxtaposes its boundaries. Indeed, Cioffi comments how:

38.

Alice in the Cities 1975 Wim Wenders

‘The program [of the Parc] can be in constant change according to need [...] [O]ne of the structures has even recently changed from a restaurant, to a gardening centre, to an arts work shop, and each of these changes occurred easily while the Parc as a whole still retained its overall identity’ (Cioffi, 2012, 19).

The Parc, therefore, has a mutable quality even in the structures that retain some semblance of form.

Even when we are invited to be spectators, the changes that come about remind us of our lack of ability to perceive truth in reality – like Sartre’s Nausea - and further demonstrates the application to architecture, by Tschumi, of his concept that architecture is unstable.

39.

Double Standard 1961 Dennis Hopper

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40.

Par de la Villete rendered sketches n.d.

Bernard Tschumi

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41.

Lounge Paintings 1983 Photograph Wim Wenders

42.

Paris, Texas 1987 Film Still Wim Wenders

43.

Western World Near four corners 1983 Wim Wenders

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Breaking The Grid

Cumulative

Fractured Space

44.

Beginning?

Middle?

End? 2013 own image 40

Second Vision

New Territories

Linking Space

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Conclusion

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My question throughout has been what is the role of framing within painting, film, and architecture, and how does this framing impact on our understanding of space and event? How do we break away from this notion that we are permanent spectators of life: how do we become participants?

I have established that even when we frame something, in an attempt to provide coherence to ‘the incredible confusion of appearances and phenomena’ (Graf, 2002, 2). of life, there is a life beyond the frame that can be thought of as our mind attempting to create sequences and promenades through space and time. I have shown how Le Corbusier, through the use of placing objects in his photos, has framed his building within the language of voyeurism in order to create mystery and intrigue about what happens within the active space of the Villa Savoye. The common thread between Le Corbusier, Tschumi’s Manhattan Transcripts, the paintings of the Impressionists and Edward Hopper, is that they are trying to make sense of the city by drawing attention to the kinetics of a space.

What seems to become problematic is when a frame asks us to look into it, rather than beyond it, as in the case of Mary Cassatt’s, Woman in Black at the Opera (1879). Perhaps this is because, a painting should be thought of as a symbolic window, in which it is: ‘By its very nature […] meant for looking out of, not the reverse. A view of the inside from the outside [therefore] confuses and perverts the ontology of the window and makes it a voyeuristic instrument.’ (Pérez-Gomez, 2004, 235).

Whereas Mary Cassatt’s painting seems to depict an insular closed narrative, the Impressionist paintings offer up numerous unfinished stories – the frame becomes a window to look out of, rather than in to. In the same way, Tschumi’s Parc de la Villette, by not including any geographical references for narrative closure, satisfies our desire to leave things unfinished. What is needed is an ethos of nihilism in which we become passive subjects. As long as there is a road to travel on, we do not need a place to arrive at; our imagination offers us the opportunity to heighten and expand our experiences, breaking down any divide that even a window puts up.

Derrida says that: ‘Even if we’re in a state of hopelessness, a sense of expectation is an integral part of our relationship to time. Hopelessness is possible only because we do hope that some good, loving someone could come to.’ (McKenna, 2004, 53).

I think this comes closest to a theory of architecture that I would like to disseminate; an architecture that is, like Tschumi’s follies, child-like, playful and ambiguous in its form and façade. An architecture that is politically neutral in its mutable quality. An architecture that reflects the thinking of the hero Friedrich Munroe at the end of Wenders’ film, The State Of Things, who says, ‘life goes by without the need to turn it into stories’ (Graf, 2002, 60); a museum that could be a gallery; a gallery that could be a church; a church that could be a playground. Derrida’s “state of hopelessness” begins when we move. To retain “a sense of expectation”, what is required is architecture that reflects the random spontaneity of life – a man unexpectedly running across some train tracks.

To answer Tschumi’s question of, ‘[c]an one attempt to make a contribution to architectural discourse by relentlessly stating that there is no space without [an] event, no architecture without [a] program?’

(Tschumi, 1996,139), I believe that the answer is that a space cannot contain a story without the event of someone entering it - just like the man who runs over Wenders’ train tracks - but that architecture can exist without a specific program due to a sense of introspective hopelessness that a promenade provides when we come to understand its nihilistic qualities. According to Wenders: ‘[P]aintings lack something [...] [W]hat [is] missing [is] an understanding of time’ (Hoffman, 1992, 51).

I have shown that even when looking at painting, time can exist beyond the boundaries of the frame, but I do agree with the importance Wenders places on time, for once time is a possibility - once we walk along a promenade - then there is the invigorating possibility of stories to remain unfinished.

My final question, however, which I will leave unanswered is: Could architecture without a clearly defined program result in an ‘invasion and inflation of meaningless images’ (Hoffman, 1992, 22), in much the same way that television, for Wenders, has become ‘the optical toxin’ (Hoffman, 1992, 22) and degeneration of life?

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45.

Road, Near Silver City 1983 Wim Wenders

44

46.

Alice in the Cities 1975 Film still Wim Wenders

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30. WENDERS, Wim, 2003 ,Street Corner Butte, Montana. Available at <http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663666/wim-wendersstravel-photography-as-haunting-and-beautiful-as-his-films> Accessed on [4th March 2013]

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34. TSCHUMI, Bernard, Unknown Date, Follies. Available at <www.bernardtschumiarchitects.com> Accessed on [5th March 2013]

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35. SPIERS, Randy, 2012, Parc de la Villette - Sculpture Moderne. Available at <http://ead.nb.admin.ch/web/biennale/bi06_A/ index_n.htm> Accessed on [5th March 2013]

29. WENDERS, Wim, 2008, Ferris Wheel, Armenia. Available at <http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663666/wim-wenderss-travelphotography-as-haunting-and-beautiful-as-his-films> Accessed on [4th March 2013]

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36. TSCHUMI, Bernard, 1983, Parc de la Villette, Paris. Available at <http://www.frac-centre.fr/collection/collection-art-architecture/index-des-auteurs/auteurs/projets-64.html?authID=192&ensembleID=599&oeuvreID=3081> Accessed on [5th March 2013] 37. KNOLL, Andre, 2011, Axon. Available at <http://www.archdaily.com/92321/ad-classics-parc-de-la-villette-bernardtschumi/> Accessed on [2ND Jan 2013] 38. WENDERS, Wim, 1975, Alice in the Cities. Available at <http://www.curzoncinemas.com/library/films/2031/alice-in-the-cities/> Accessed on [6th Dec 2012] 39. HOPPER, Dennis, 1961, Double Standard. Available at <http://artblart.com/2012/10/12/> Accessed on [6th Dec 2012] 40. TSCHUMI, Bernard, n.d, Parc de la Villette rendered sketches. Available at < http://www.garten-landschaft.de/blog/waskann-uns-eine-lehre-sein.html> Accessed on [1st April 2013] 41. WENDERS, Wim, 1983, Lounge Paintings. Available at http://www.wendersimages.com/ausstellungen/writteninthewest. php?lang=en Accessed on [6th Dec 2012] 42. WENDERS, Wim, 1984, Paris Texas. Available at <http://worldscinema.org/2012/05/wim-wenders-paris-texas-extras-1984/> Accessed on [6th Dec 2012] 43. WENDERS, Wim, 1983, Western World, Near Four Corners. Available at <http://www.wendersimages.com/ausstellungen/ writteninthewest.php?lang=en> Accessed on [6th Dec 2012] 44. Own Image, 2013, Beginning? Middle? End? 45. WENDERS, Wim,1983, Road, Near Silver, City, New Mexico. Available at <http://www.wendersimages.com/ausstellungen/ writteninthewest.php?lang=en> Accessed on [6th Dec 2012] 46. WENDERS, Wim,1975, Paris Texas. Available at <http://infinitetext.com/post/18288106299/wim-wenders-alice-in-the-cities-1974> Accessed on [6th Dec 2012]