DAY 4- Thursday June 5th

The Day 4 experience is up in the student's neck of the woods.....in other words, the field trip is close to their "hostel" so they can sleep in later and have more recovery time from whatever the heck they were doing the night before........

As previously mentioned, at the Pompidou Center we saw the fine Bernard Tschumi exhibition with some nice drawings of Parc de la Villette, which is our destination.

The Parc was built on the site of the largest slaughterhouse in Paris (via Napoleon III as part of the redevelopment urban plan in 1867). Not exactly the ideal site. The slaughterhouse was relocated in 1974. Tschumi, a Swiss-born French architect, won the design competition in 1982-1983.

Thirty-five follies (red squares on the plan at left) are placed on a grid and offer a distinct organization to the park. The grid points are placed at 120 meter (393.6 feet) intervals that serve as a common denominator to the entire park. The follies are based on 10x10x10 meter cubes and can be expressed or configured in many different ways within the cubic volume. Architecturally, the follies are meant to act as points of reference that help visitors gain a sense of direction and navigate throughout the space.

Free standing icons, "the follies act as architectural representations of deconstruction. In architecture, a folly is a building constructed primarily for decoration, but either suggesting by its appearance some other purpose, or merely so extravagant that it transcends the normal range of garden ornaments or other class of building to which it belongs. In a deconstructive vacuum without historical relation, many have found connections between the steel structures and the previous buildings that were part of the old industrial fabric of the area. Today, the follies remain as cues to organization and direction for park visitors." 
-quote, some stuff on the Internet-

 



Hot Dog! We now have ourselves not only Post-modernist, but Deconstructionist!  Tschumi, who I could have sworn on Day 3 was a post-modernist, believes that Deconstructivism is simply a move against the practice of Post-modernism, which he said, and I am not making this up, involved "making doric temple forms out of plywood". 

Tschumi designed the Parc de la Villette with the intention of "creating a space that exists in a vacuum, something without historical precedent. Visitors view and react to the plan, landscaping, and sculptural pieces without the ability to cross-reference them with previous works of historical architecture. By allowing visitors to experience the architecture of the park within this constructed vacuum, the time, recognitions, and activities that take place in that space begin to acquire a more vivid and authentic nature. The park is not acting as a spectacle; it is not an example of traditional park design such as New York City’s Central Park. The Parc de la Villette strives to act as merely a frame for other cultural interaction." -quote, some more stuff on the Internet-

Let us sum up or "deconstruct', as it were, the above:  what this all means is that the average "visitor" is clueless and not at all concerned about "cultural interaction" and "vivid and authentic nature"; rather the visitor is looking for the playground to drop off the kids in order to commence an extended search for beer. Meanwhile, intermittent roving bands of "post-modernists", disturbed, and oddly attracted to Tschumi's vision, search for meaning among the follies.


There have been many criticisms of the park since its original completion. To some, the park has little concern with the human scale of park functions and the vast open space seems to challenge the expectation that visitors may have of an urban park.

http://www.pps.org/great_public_spaces/one?public_place_id=369

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