This week the articles mainly talk about situationism. Situationism is a strategy which describes the environment around us. It has a big relationship with the time we traveled during our life. From Rossi’s idea of architecture, cities have its own memories, these memories give the city a special and unique definition. This idea has some similarities with the situationism, which believes during the time, the environment around us defines where and what we should be in the future. It is same for architectures; the environment of the architectures can define what will it be in the future. However, the difference is: “Yet we should remember that there is no social or political change without the movements and programs that transgress supposedly stable institutionality, architectural or otherwise; that there is no architecture without everyday life, movement, and action; and that it is the most dynamic aspects of their disjunctions that suggest a new definition of architecture.” (Bernard Tschumi, 23). From the text, we can see architecture is much more like a dynamic thing. It does not mean the memories define an architecture, but the environment of the architecture stimulates the change of architecture.
Situationism defines architecture system through how the city is developing and shaping during the time. Situationism can explain why human beings, architectures and cities will do such reaction and be what they are like today’s world. Debord’s idea is the things happened during an object’s life defines what the object will be. And since all these things can not been forecasted because situationism is dynamic. As a result, the future is also unknown. This is similar to the Murphy’s Law in philosophy.
Tschumi, Bernard. n.d. Archtecture and Disjcuntion.
Debord, Guy. 1956. Various Readings.
I think your summary of Tschumi’s essays address his fundamental points, good job. If anything, I probably wouldn’t consider Tschumi a ‘Situationist’, but there were undoubtedly overlaps between his approach and the group. Regarding Situationism proper (second paragraph), your summary is quite broad – perhaps it would have helped to focus on particular words (e.g. derive, psychogeography, play), to help drive a more general synopsis of the essays. I think more than a concept of the future, it is important to mention issues such as chance, the city, and so on.