ABSTRACT
In France, the events of May ’68 took place at the moment in which the old Beaux-Arts school was dismantled, replaced by several Unités Pédagogiques (Pawley, Tschumi 1971).10 In the following years, sociologists, and particularly urban sociologists from Henri Lefebvre’s sphere of inuence, were invited to dierent unités and took part in radicalizing the students (Violeau 2007).11 Among the young architects and students immersed in the radical ferment of the period was Bernard Tschumi, who worked at the time for Candilis, Josic & Woods; Candilis was head of UP6, the most politically-committed unit (Martin 1990). Tschumi was familiar with the work of Lefebvre, and knew Hubert Tonka, Lefebvre’s assistant and a member of the radical architecture group Utopie. In 1970, the architecture journal L’Architecture d’aujourdhui published an ideas competition entry by Tschumi and a workcolleague, Fernando Montés, called Do-it-Yourself-City. The project marries a technoutopia with radical politics and is indebted to Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt (Ockman 2008: 160). It includes diagrams, tables, collages, and axonometric drawings of small, mobile objects which were designated as urban interventions, functioning as local multimedia information and communication centres. The project expresses interests that can be associated with systems theory, cybernetics, or informatics. The ideas of ‘play’ and ‘event’ already appear at this early moment: ‘The inhabitant’s disposable means,’ write the architects, ‘permit his choice of diverse degrees: change of his environment, select his informations [sic], provoke an event. He is able to visualize and discuss information, active reunions of persons, of artistic manifestations, as well as of games’ (Tschumi and Montés 1970: 98-105).
