In 1982 the French government of François Mitterrand called the competition for the Parc de la Villette, a space of 55 hectares at the north-eastern edge of Paris, where the city's great slaughterhouse and cattle market had stood. Hundreds of projects took part. In 1983 the winner was Bernard Tschumi (born in Lausanne in 1944), an architect and theorist who had built almost nothing but had just published the Manhattan Transcripts, a series of drawings that narrate architecture as a sequence of actions. The winning project does not look like a park: it has no avenues, no flowerbeds, no design of greenery. It has a grid.
Points, lines, surfaces
Tschumi divides the park into three superimposed systems, which do not converse with one another. The system of points is a regular grid 120 metres on a side, at whose intersections stand the folies: red cubes 10 metres on a side, in steel, each different from the others, with different functions (cafés, kiosks, workshops, information points). The system of lines is made of routes: a long covered walkway and tree-lined avenues that cross the park. The system of surfaces comprises the large lawns and the areas equipped for play and events. Each system follows its own logic; from their superimposition arises what cannot be predicted.
The theory behind the project is that architecture is not the form of buildings but what happens in them: the event, the encounter, the movement. A traditional park prescribes a route; La Villette offers a structure and lets users decide. The folies have no fixed use: some do host a café or an information centre, others have been occupied by unforeseen uses. Tschumi also collaborates with Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman on a project for a garden in the park, the Choral Work, which would not be built but remains a celebrated episode of dialogue between philosophy and architecture.
The Acropolis Museum
Tschumi's best-known project, after La Villette, is the New Acropolis Museum in Athens (2009), at the foot of the hill. The site has a complication: beneath the ground the remains of a Roman and Byzantine neighbourhood came to light, which could not be demolished. Tschumi raises the building on pilotis and leaves the excavation visible through glass floors, so that the visitor literally walks over the ancient city. On the top floor, the Parthenon Gallery is a glass box rotated relative to the rest of the building so as to align with the real Parthenon, visible in the distance. The fragments of the frieze on display are looked at and, just beyond the glass, one sees the temple from which they come.