Parc de la Villette Context - Landscape Architecture

Parc de la Villette, Paris
Bernard Tschumi designer
J. Daniel Pugh LARC 263
November 16, 2004
The Context Paper
This paper is written to help people know Bernard Tschumi and how he came to be
the designer for one of the few remaining large sites available within the city of Paris,
which became the Parc de le Villette. This is his story.
BACKGROUND OF THE LANDSCAPE
Parc de le Villette is sited on the former location of the Paris slaughterhouses
(Tschumi, Tschumi 32), and has a total area of 125 acres. The parc encompasses 186,000
sq.ft. of restaurants, art workshops, music pavilions, recreation facilities and gardens, as
well as 70,000 sq.ft of galleries and bridges and 70 acres of landscaping.
BACKGROUND OF THE DESIGNER
Bernard Tscumi spent half of his childhood in Lausanne, Switzerland and half in
Paris, France due to the fact that his mother was French and his father was Swiss. His
father studied architecture in Paris, and at the end of WWII he set up the School of
Architecture of the Ecole Polytechnique in Lausanne. Because Tscumi spent so much
time in both Lausanne and Paris, he felt that he was not limited to having only one
nationality. As an adult he enjoyed living in New York because he felt there was no such
thing as “nationality” there.
RELATING THE DESIGN TO THE DESIGNER’S LIFE
Tschumi spent the formative years from childhood to adulthood living in apartments
within cities. Because he never lived in a house or in the country, he is very much “of the
city,” a world he knows very well.
THE SITE AS A PRODUCT OF THE DESIGNER’S AGENDA
Tschumi was not particularly interested in either the real or virtual worlds, separately,
but he was attracted to the tension between those two worlds. He felt that when the real
and the virtual worlds come together, tension is created and the potential for design
begins. (Tschumi, Tschumi 23)
In 1982 Tschumi wanted to test his ideas in competitions with other architects, and he
entered the competition for the design of the Parc de le Villette against 470 other
designers. Up to this point, he believed his architecture would be purely theoretical.
However, he surprised himself and won the competition, the first he ever entered. Such
an unexpected victory was equivalent to winning the Kentucky Derby without ever
having raced a horse before! (Tschumi, Tschumi 32)

In Tschumi’s mind the Parc de le
Villette was not a park but a new type of
city. Despite the fact that he started with an
old industrial site, he decided that his design
would not be contextual nor would it
recreate or refer to things from the old site.
Instead, he was starting from a pure
concept, and for inspiration he looked at
general concepts of large organizations and
how they fit into the city of Paris. After
testing the superimpositions of abstract
concepts about organization, he decided the
point-grid system worked best and that the
concept of the discontinuous city would be
the starting point for his design of the parc.
(Tschumi, Tschumi 32,44)
When Tschumi first made his design presentation to President Mitterand, he brought
four park designs with him: First was the 18 th century park at Versailles; second was the
19 th century park of Les Buttes-Chaumont in Paris; third was a 20 th century park,
Brazilia, under construction; and fourth he presented La Villette as the new 21 st century
park. (Tschumi, Tschumi 45) Tschumi’s design of the Parc de la Villette is
anticontextual, has no relation to its surroundings, and subverts borders on which
“context” depends. (Lissarrague vi)
While Tschumi had resisted the
idea of ‘contextualism’ for Parc de le
Villette, it does work well within its
context. The axis of the 19 th Century
cast-iron market hall is not quite
perpendicular to the canal, and this
allows the north-south gallery to travel
slowly from the west to the east and
move across the grid of the folies. The
folies run precisely parallel to the canal
and the line of movement challenges
the architecture. This is not an
aesthetic choice but one following the
logic of Tschumi’s design. “I’m not
interested in composition, but in
montage,” he explained. (Tschumi,
Tschumi 50) “I think the park works
very well functionally and visually
with the other projects built around the
site, such as Cité de la Musique by
Christian de Portzamparc, the Zenith,
and the Museum of Science and
Technology. The site is so charged
Where the Parc meets the built world
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with different approaches to design. I think our folies provide a way to punctuate and
articulate the whole.” (Tschumi, Tschumi 51)
Tschumi seemed to enjoy the various reactions his design elicits: “Here nobody
knows what that image or theme is. People do react to the park, though. They like it or
hate it, although most don’t understand it. And that’s fine with me, because I don’t want
it to be so easy to understand. I want it to be used as a mirror of their questions.”
(Tschumi, Tschumi 51)
CONTEXT OF OTHER WORKS CREATED BY THE DESIGNER
As stated earlier, Parc de le Villette was Tschumi’s first competition. Up to this point
he had been teaching architectural theory. Now he wanted to test his theories against
other designers. The Parc de le Villette competition was particularly difficult to grasp for
many of the competitors, but Tschumi did not see it that way because he found it more
challenging to work on difficult projects than on easy ones. (Tschumi, Tschumi 19)
Tschumi’s first projects, “Rituals,” explore the relations between space, movement,
and action. His second project types draw on his first works with movement. He uses a
randomly curved vector crossing through a grid; a vector as a landscape; vector as
infrastructure and vectors that go against “normative contexts.” His third works, voids
and solids, explore the architectural device of carving into solids to create “void” spaces.
His fourth project types encourage activation of the void created. He does this by
increasing the intensity of the space with public activities. Tschumi’s fifth project type is
the envelope. It is the common denominator of all architecture, the enclosure (Tschumi,
Event 12)
EVENTS OF THE PERIOD THAT MAY HAVE INFLUENCED THE DESIGN
It took ten years for Tschumi’s ideas to become the architectural plans he submitted
to the Parc de Villette Competition in 1983. The events during his time in London
between 1970 and 1976 were formative to the design he submitted in 1983, more
formative than the events of 1983. In 1970 he began teaching at the Architectural
Association in London and had the opportunity to meet many young architects that ten
years later would collectively be developing a new architectural
sensibility. It was a very dynamic time for these designers.
(Tschumi, Tschumi 16)
In 1976 Tschumi gave his students at the Architectural
Association a project: They were to take James Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake and design a landscape plan from the text. Each student
was assigned a point on a grid of Covent Garden in London,
Tschumi’s way of organizing the students to get a lot of work
done. This project was named Joyce’s Garden and would be one
of the concepts used for Parc de le Villette seven years later.
(Tschumi, Tschumi 44)
Joyce’s Garden with point grid
point grid
In 1976 Tschumi was doing some research called the Screenplays or the Manhattan
Transcripts in which he was experimenting with movement, events and the systems of
points, lines and surfaces. He was testing ideas on movements and the dynamic of events
and activity, and this became his deciding strategy to enter the competition for Parc de le
Villette and use multiple devices to organize complexity.
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SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STRUCTURE OF THE PERIOD
Large public projects in France tend to have centralized decision making;
consequently, a politician with real power does not have to get approval from a
committee or governing body. That is why President Mitterand was able to secure 300
million dollars for the construction of Parc de le Villette. While there were debates,
arguments and newspaper editorials about the project, none of this was as difficult as the
process of getting a comparably sized project completed in the United States. (Tschumi,
Tschumi 24)
STATE OF THE FINE AND APPLIED ARTS
“ The competition for the Parc de la Villette was the first of the international
architectural competitions in Paris in the 1980’s, all of which were part of a major
cultural and political effort to restructure entire areas of the French capital,” according to
Bernard Tschumi. (Kipnis 125)
INFLUENCE OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
During a 1997 interview Bernard Tschumi indicated, “Architects will begin to do a
lot of work in terms of building technology. This is something I refer to as glue and
microchips. Of course, I’m referring to two technologies here: building technology and
computer technology. These two things together will have far more impact than anything
about form. I think that it is here that a fascination exists, and I think we are in a very
exciting period. I think that in these ways architecture is still a young discipline, with a
long way to go.” (Tschumi, Tschumi 23)
SENSIBILITIES & FINANCES OF THE CLIENT
Bernard Tscumi’s client was the French Government, and in 1982 it was not known if
the government had budgeted money for the project. The government was also about to
change. The project started under Mitterand, but in 1986 a new government from the
right came to power and nearly ended the project. This political volatility would last
through most of the next twelve years of the parc’s construction. At times, the project
would stop for six months before more funding could be found. (Tschumi, Tschumi 45)
POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO HISTORIC PRECEDENTS
Concepts from other disciplines, film or philosophy were introduced at this
competition, and Tschumi intentionally did not want to represent an architectural
heritage. His decision upset many people, including the architectural establishment. The
French press was also quite critical, but his design did get supportive coverage from the
international media. (Tschumi, Tschumi 48) Peter Eisenman said, “It is the ‘difference
between’ that was being sought. Atopia is literally ‘no place’ or ‘without place.’ In order
to understand the nature of this displacement, the nature of traditional place must be
defined. The concept of urban place has been associated with a bounded or framed
unitary condition of presence. Unlike the Japanese conception of ma as ‘space between’
and mu as ‘no place,’ both of which imply a very real condition of a presence in a
condition of absence, Western conceptions of place are always presence bounded as well
as being grounded to a specific location.” (Kipnis 135)
Tschumi summarized the intent and fulfillment of his design by saying, “Our project
is motivated by the most constructive principle within the legitimate ‘history’ of
architecture, by which new programmatic developments and inspirations result in new
typologies. Our ambition is to create a new model in which program, form and ideology
all play integral roles.” (Barzilay 38)
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During the 19 th century Frederick Law Olmsted brought a “representation” of the
natural world to cities. In the 20 th century parks are no longer “separate” from the city—
replications of nature, dropped into an urban world. The park for the 21 st century is
integrated within the functions of the city, and it needs to complement the vision of the
city so that the city will exist within the park and embrace urban reality. (Lissarrague 1)
Conclusion
In French, “La Villette means little city.” Through the force of his revolutionary
design, Tschumi was able to anticipate the future of Paris in his gift to the city—the Parc
de le Villette.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Tschumi, Bernard. Bernard Tschumi / edited and photographed by Yukio Futugawa.
Tokyo: A.D.A. Edita, 1997.
Kipnis, Jeffrey and Thomas Leeser, eds. Chora L works: Jacques Derrida and Peter
Eisenman. New York: Monacelli Press, 1997.
Barzilay, Marianne, Catherine Hayward, and Lucette Lombard-Valentino. L’Invention
dup arc. Paris: Graphite Editions, 1984.
Tschumi, Bernard. Event-cities 2 / Bernard Tschumi. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Lissarrague, Jacques. La Cite’ des sciences et de l’industrie, Paris-La Villette. Paris:
Electra Moniteur, 1988.
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