An Urban Park for the 21st Century

READING 2: An Urban Park for the 21st Century
Tschumi, B., 1987. Cinegram Folie: Le Parc De La Villette, Princeton, N.J: Princeton Architctural Press. pp1-27.

-          The Parc de La Villette set forth an “urban park” proposing a combination of variety of activities to encourage new attitudes and perspectives.

-          A breakthrough from the 1970s to now where analysis addressed the issue of activities occurring in the city and organisation of functions and events.

-          It is an “open-air cultural centre” that encourages an integrate programmatic policy relating both the city’s needs and its limitations. The program allocated space for workshops, gymnasiums, exhibitions, concerts, scientific experiments, games; to addition of the Museum of Science and Technology and a City of Music.

-          It is regarded as one of the largest buildings ever constructed; discontinuous building, still a single structure overlapping in certain areas of the city and suburbs.

-          “It forms an embryonic model of what the new programs for the 21^st century will be.”

-          “The park forms part of the vision of the city” where the new urban parks are based on cultural invention, education and entertainment. Under the modern city conditions have invalidated the time when parks were an image of nature. It has been seen as the “exhaustion of the open space concept faced with the reality of the cultural park.”

-          The point grids of folies were developed from an existing figurative element, the abstract cube. It’s the transformation and combination that gives this development its architectural elements.

-          The superimposition of points, lines and surfaces created the park as it generated a series of calculated tensions which reinforce the dynamism of the place. Each of the systems (points, lines and surfaces) displays its own logic and independence.

-          A structural solution used was by exploding programmatic requirements through the site onto a regular grid of points of intensity. Therefore, the different types of activities are first isolated and then distributed on the site, encouraging the combination of apparently incompatible activities.

The New Model
A distinct innovate park that embodies the change of social context which creates a new model of program, form and typologies all play integral roles.

Systems and Superimpositions

The project is located in a populated semi-industrial quarter that includes two existing structure. The solution used was a simple distribution of programmatic requirements over the total site in regular arrangements of points, intensities, designated in Folios.

The scheme permits maximum movement through the site, emphasising discoveries and presenting visitors with a variety of programs and events.

Developments in architecture are generally related to cultural developments motivated by new functions, social relations or technological advances. The scheme takes this to produce itself as an image; a paradigmatic example of architectural organisation. This concept consists of series of relation neutral objects which have similarities which allow them to be qualified by function.

Each folio is bare, undifferentiated and “industrial” in character. Each folio constitutes an autonomous sign that indicated its independent programmatic concerns and possibilities while suggesting a common core to the total system. The theme and variation throughout the park reads symbolically and structurally while allowing maximum programmatic flexibility and invention.

The Parc de la Villette presents a variation on the canonical modern spatial scheme of the open plan. The grid of the Folies is a self-referential meaning: park, program and site. It’s a system of objects movements and spaces that give the park its logic, particularities and limits. The overlay of these systems creates tension thereby enhancing the dynamism of the park.

Frames and Sequences

The cinematic promenade is the feature of the park; a film strip of images, order of events, movements and space. Each part qualifies and reinforces the next and therefore as a sequence produces one story. The park is also inhabited by other events, uses, activities which are created on the structures. Therefore each frame within the park has an unique feel and is single pieces of work. The framing principle is the arrangement of the sequences whereby each frame can be mixed and combined. The content is different and can produce individual viewpoints. The landscape can also help to produce rhythms along with simultaneity of frames and lighting strips. The rhythms can be the movements between folies and the melodies are the spatial ambiances.

Concept of Folie: Madness and the Combinative

Madness is a constant point of reference throughout the park where it illustrates the disjunctions and disassociations between use, form and social values. It’s related the psychoanalytical meaning of insanity and related to the built sense of folly.  The historical connotations are abstract, broad and will develop further with new meanings in the future when people visit and have their impact. 

The folies stress that madness articulates an order to preserve cultural and social order and the park corresponds its analogy with Schizophrenia. To know one’s relationship with such dislocated city parts therefore suggesting transference as the subject. Transference being ‘transport’ a dissociation of fragments that are meeting throughout the park by meeting points. The folie becomes the common denominator between people, events and objects which develops a point of intensity.

Combination is the unforseen regroupings of the fragments. The autonomous fragments are recombined through a series of permutations, following no rules of classicism or modernism. The set of combinations and permutations are analysed as space, movement, event, technique, symbol as opposed to the old play between function and form. It is no longer concerned with composition or the expression of function but as an object of permutation, combining sets of variables, manifesting, domains different acts of pathways and a free plan. It allows for new unimagined activities to occur.

Structural System

They are composed of fragments of cage extended in additional geometric 3D elements. A red steel envelope encompasses the structural frame. The folies relate to the structural grid as a deviation; a distortion of the norm leading to heterogeneity and dissociation.