VIOLENCE AS A METAPHOR: TRANSGRESSION AND THE PRODUCTION OF SPACE
ART (ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM) AND CULTURE
Renata Hejduk, Ph.D.
College of Design, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
Arizona State University
This paper looks at the work of the French Swiss Architect Bernard Tschumi (well known for his design of the Parc de la Villette in Paris) and discusses his early theoretical writings on the topic of violence and architecture. In the mid-late 1970s, violence and transgression become the means whereby Tschumi begins to critique and release architecture from its reasoned language, and the human body from its bind in space. Tschumi contends that if violence is a metaphor for an intensity of a relationship, then architecture transcends this metaphor by its very physicality. The underlying violence of architecture exudes a deep sensuality “an unremittent eroticism” through its “rational-irrational forces” that are put into play. He argues that if we integrate violence into architecture (or admit its being) then we will admit a new pleasure into architecture. The violence of architecture (like any violence) contains the possibility of change and renewal.
While studying and working in Paris in the late 60s, Tschumi is directly influenced by the work of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre and the work of the sometime-Surrealist writer Georges Bataille, as well as by the post-Structuralist thought of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and later Jacques Derrida. In particular, Lefebvre’s and Bataille’s writings on violence and Tschumi’s reporting of the May 1968 riots in Paris set the stage for Tschumi’s essays of the late 1970s and 1980s. For Tschumi, violence is not a form of brutality, but “a metaphor for the intensity of a relationship between individuals and their surrounding spaces.” Tschumi’s argument is that any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence because any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space. When an individual enters a space they inflict their presence into the controlled order of the architecture. The act of entering a building violates the space and disturbs the purity of architectural order.
Tschumi recognizes two forms of violence: the first is the conflict between objects: the violence of form versus form (Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau); the violence and disruption inflicted by any new construction on its surroundings, this is a contextual violence, an example given is Adolf Loos’s House for Tristan Tzara in the context of 19th c. vernacular Paris. The second form of violence is not metaphorical, it is programmatic and encompasses “those uses, events, and programs that , by accident or by design, are specifically evil and destructive. Among them are killing, internment, and torture, which become slaughterhouses, concentration camps, or torture chambers.” Thus, violence in architecture can be metaphorical and transgression, and it can lead us to a new pleasure that comes out of conflict, disjunction, and rupture. Yet, there is another violence, non-metaphorical that has no boundaries, no limits, and cannot be tolerated or reveled in: this is the programmatic violence of hate, and of destruction. For Tschumi, the first form is a possible site of and means toward cultural change, the second intolerable.