Week 9

From looking at Tschumi’s Manhattan Projects, even just skimming the images, I began to draw conclusions about the rationality and connections between the sequences that he presents. I tried to organize rules from the product that he created. This is part of what I think is important about his work, the clash of unexpected parts that through their combination we instinctively seek to draw conclusions between and attempt to see the connection. By doing so it forces us to think critically about the environment that we occupy. 

Reading Debord’s writing, I think the situationist viewpoint of life is very interesting. He describes the life of a person as “a succession of fortuitous situations, and even if none of them is exactly the same as another the immense majority of them are so undifferentiated and so dull that they give a perfect impression of similitude… the corollary of this state of things is that the rare intensely engaging situations found in life strictly confine and limit this life,” (Debond). 

Tschumi’s works expand the limits of this definition of life, as his efforts at defamiliarization break the monotony of undifferentiable moments. We can draw a connection between the idea of derive and Tschumi’s programmatic sequences, which he describes as suggesting “secret maps and impossible fictions, rambling collections of events all strung along a collection of spaces, frame after frame, room after room, episode after episode”. This is similar to the wandering idea of a derive, it allows a person to progress through a sequence without having a clear direction or expectation of what is to come next, allowing them to draw their own connections between the two so that no two people moving through the space will have the same experience.

References

Debord, Guy. 1956. Various Readings.

Tschumi, Bernard. “Sequences.” Chapter in Architecture and Disjunction, 139–51. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981.

Tschumi, Bernard. n.d. Architecture and Disjunction.