ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Bernard Tschumi’s concern about the dialectic between social praxis and spatial forms. It analyses how the intensification for the interest in the programme is related to the attempt of the architects to transform the instability of the “lived-in world”. At the core of the chapter is the exploration of how programme can function as generator in architecture. A parameter of Tschumi’s perspective that is scrutinised in this chapter is the exploration of many different formal variations that can be produced if certain parameters that are central for the design strategy for a project are fixed but all the other parameters are altered. Particular emphasis is placed on the impact of Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, Theodor Adorno, György Lukács and Walter Benjamin’s work on Tschumi’s understanding of the dialectic between social praxis and spatial forms. Tschumi’s pedagogy and practice are important for grasping the epistemological shifts related to how the modes of representation can grasp the dynamic aspects of how space is reinvented through its inhabitation. Among the aspects that are analysed in this chapter are the teaching strategies of Tschumi at the Architectural Association in London in the 1970s and the emergence of the paperless studios at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Planning and Preservation in the 1990s.
