What is a Folie?

READING 1: Paris/La Villete

Bure, G. 2008. Paris/La Villete. In. Bernard Tschumi.ed.G.Bure, 47-73. Birkhauser: Basel.

• “Change was in the air”: promotion of French culture through architectural policies designed to develop a major public institution.
• Tschumi proposed to redevelop La Villette, originally slated for a modern-day slaughterhouse and shifted to a museum to a 21^st century park.
• Allowed Tschumi to engage theory and practice, the virtual and the real.
• Reviewed the history from its creation 1867 up to the controversial closing of the slaughterhouse in 1874.
• Research: Duras predicted it would be “filed away as a memory”. Carnus recalled the site as a diaspora. -Weyergans described “is indeed a place, that is, a space occupied by a body”.
• Tschumi’s concept of “space, event and movement” and his interest in architecture as a “form of knowledge rather than knowledge of form” were taking shape. It integrated ideas and concepts from Joyce’s Garden, the Screenplays and The Manhattan Transcripts.
• First proposal: more urban project “in the park, the city should not exist”.
• Joyce’s Garden: idea of a common denominator as organising principle for a heterogeneous set of information.
• Screenplays series: the concept of cinematically derived actions.
• The Manhattan Transcripts: which an architectural semiology of mobility was born.
• Resulting in a new concept of urbanism as “cinematic” superimposition of autonomous but interacting layers (points, lines and planes).
• Readability, rigor and simplicity of expression combined with complexity of reasoning and multiple possibilities.
• 25 folios that punctuate the 135 acre park won the competition.
• More than isolated sculptural objects, the folies appeared at once punctuation, animation and action. The simplicity of their assembly system belied the sophistication of their potential configurations.
• -          Folies: Information, ticket, cafe, music, observatory, stair, clock. From the park entrance along the entire promenade; the buildings occupy space, generate movement and amplify action.
• Layers (points, lines and planes) 
•   Lines indication circulation paths across the site
•  Two major pedestrians axes took shape linking the cardinal points of the site
• Offsetting perpendicular axes, Tschumi developed a sinuous “cinematic” promenades that winds its way though almost two miles of garden.
• Folies activated the rhythm of programmed functions.
•  A point-grid of discrete buildings known by their French name, Folies, demarcates the site. These folies, in turn, feed polemics and open a flood of opinions, fueling debate. 26 in number, 36 x 36 foot red cubes articulated to different programmatic requirements and spaced out at regular intervals over the evenly gridded field.
• Red Folies: “activators of space” rather than as sculptural objects.
• Symbolically exceeding their respective function as usable space, signage or even visual markers.
• Tschumi’s vision of an “urban park”: a point grid structure with thematic gardens and area of intense activity interrupting zones of silence.
• Tschnumi’s folies recall the linguistic inventiveness of his earlier work and influences.
• He embraced the notion of linguistic slippage or ‘transference’ in architecture, and the structures were both architectural “follies” and “madness”.
• The folies were conceived in the spirit of linguistic play: they resisted a precise architectural meaning and instead, implied multiple meanings.
• The folies change according to their assemblage and topographical positions. And parameters that constantly transformed their appearance by the seasons, the hours, light and shade, night and day.
• The folies missed “a house with a fold-up stage, a revolving library, a winter garden, a sculptural ensemble, a chapel”.. The range of uses, different activities and movements animate them leading to the dissolution of programmatic specificity.
• They are multi-functional, non-functional, or designed to “collide with” or “respond to” other facilities.
• He viewed the La Villette as being “in suspense”.
• The work was of “programmatic deconstruction” and “general dislocation”.
• His interest was in a “negative grammar” made up of dissociation, dislocation, disjoining and deconstruction with the aim of questioning ‘the things that hold together’, all the while recognising the paradox that architecture and the ‘enigma’ of the work, the signature, is still after all ‘what holds together that which is  not held together organically.”