Finding a direction: Research: Tschumi

Working with sound and the site closely I feel is causing my findings to come further and further away from architecture within film and spatial design. I have begun to read into some theorists to try to see my project in a different view, and to hopefully reign in and pinpoint exactly what I am wanting, and needing to achieve. Starting with Tschimi: 


Tschumi's critical understanding of Arcitecture remains at the core of his practice today. By arguing that there is no space without event, he designs conditions for a reinvention of living, rather than repeating established aesthetic or symbolic conditions of design. Through these means of architecture becomes a frame for "constructed situations" a notion informed by the theory, city mappings and urban designs of Situationist International.

The ScreenPlays explore the relation between events ("theprogram") and architectural spaces, on one hand, and transformational devices of a sequential nature, on the other.

"There is no architecture without Action, 

There is no architecture without Event, 

There is no architecture without Program."

Instead of designing seductive shapes or forms, one would post an action or principle from which everything else would derive. 


Tschumi felt different means of expression should be able to exchange frames of reference, theoretical or technical progress, theoretical or technical progress, modes of production and distribution, they should cross their aesthetic concern, question and examine each other, let their peripheral zones be occupied, their no-mann's land explored, their borders transgressed. 


He explains that, from spaces of the past, a notion that should be treated with caution. It is often a departure point for conversation and nostalgia. 


Tschimi theories are particularly interesting to read as his views on cinema an film, can be directly drawn from expanded cinema. 

"Its the in-between that really matters, and it takes on an immense presence at Le Fresnoy. A space where anything might happen, a place of experimentation, a place located on the margins. This in-between space quickly becomes a fundamental condition of the project." 


A shelter for the set - the invertible relations between architecture and cinema bounce back in Le Fresnoy with Tschumi's "hangaring" of the existing structures, which are actually cinemas, edifices of distraction. The misunderstanding of cinema is that is it a projection system,the display space or frame, for cinema to happen on a canvas and not in a decor. 


I believe the following paragraph explained Tschumi's work, 
"The drive to create unprogrammed events reveals inventive and astonishing possibilities for the use of places. Isn't the very fact that we now visit the chapel as a museum a demonstration that its function has already changed? What we see is the matrix of a shift in the sacred. Tschumi goes even further: He claims that one can dissociate places and theory uses, thus allow unfitting practices in revised and corrected places.


The most stimulating forms are the ones that permit a variety of uses, sometimes unexpected, born of a user's sudden urge and not of the program that presided over the building construction." 


Through looking into Tschumi's work I have begun to understand what I am trying to do within the space and film; 


To think of the tide as a performance piece (the Action) having a huge effect on the atmosphere of the space and I feel in hand it reflects, literally and in some ways abstractly, the site. By recording the constant systematical rhymic change in tides, but emphasising the beauty and magical quality its holds. I hope to use both the visual and aural documentation and manipulation taken, within the site and through cinema to accentuate this fundamental element which is so often ignored. My intentions are to produce a environment which frames and adorns this performance, englufing the viewer into a transe like state, both healing and informing.