Last week we read “The Death of the Author” by Roland Barthes which does not explicitly say it has anything to do with architecture but we interpreted parallels between the author and an architect. This week in Bernard Tschumi’s “Architecture and Disjunction” he specifically outlines this metaphor in his chapter “Spaces and Events.” Tschumi poses “If writers could manipulate the structure of stories in the same was as they twist vocabulary and grammar, couldn’t architects do the same, organizing the program in a similarly objective, detached, or imaginative way?” (Tschumi 146). I found the fact that he made this comparison interesting after our discussion on “The Death of the Author” because Tschumi is trying to get people to explore the unexpected in architecture. Additionally he continues to make the connection between author and architect by talking about projects made in 1974 by students that were given literary texts that “provided programs or events on which students were to develop architectural works” such as Franz Kafka’s “Burrow” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death” (Tschumi 145). He concludes this by saying that “The unfolding of events in a literary context inevitably suggested parallels to the unfolding of events in architecture” (Tschumi 146). I think that these projects sound quite interesting because when reading a book you picture the world that is described by the author and if the author describes it well you can build the scene in your head, which usually involves buildings, and if the architecture is not described well, you as the reader cannot imagine it accurately.
Tschumi also introduces his view on the definition of “what is architecture” in saying “Our work argues that architecture–its social relevance and formal invention–cannot be dissociated from the events that ‘happen’ in it” (Tschumi 139). I do agree with Tschumi’s statement but I also do not necessarily see anything inherently wrong with admiring a pretty building for just being a well constructed or well designed structure, especially because the general public that is not educated on architectural theory might only be able to understand/appreciate these surface level aspects of architecture. Tschumi would disagree with me because he wrote with disdain that “Most exhibitions of architecture in art galleries and museums encouraged ‘surface’ practice and presented the architects work as a form of decorative painting” (Tschumi 141).
Citations:
Barthes, Roland. The Death of the Author, 1967.
Tschumi, Bernard. “Spaces and Events.” Chapter in Architecture and Disjunction, 139–51. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.
Great comparison between Barthes and Tschumi, it’s clear that you’re drawing a thread that weaves various sections of class. It would be interesting to hear more about the inherent value, and perhaps its role within the discipline, of an appreciation of architecture at the surface level. Is a break between ‘expert’ and ‘non-expert’ in architecture an inevitability? Is there value in maintaining such a distinction?