Architecture and Disjunction

Gotta love Tschumi and his wacky theories. Helped me look at architecture a different way.

The item was not properly packaged, so when I received the book in the mail, it was damaged. The item was bent and torn on not only the cover, but several pages into the book.

In an amazing collection of essays, Tschumi criticizes both modernism objectivity and post-modern nostalgia. His most important proposition -- that there is no cause and effect relationship between function and space -- is a kick in the teeth of functionalist thinkers. Instead of "form and function", he proposes an architecture based on "space, event and movement", in which the conflit and contradictions between the terms of the equation is its most relevant aspect. "Architecture and disjunction" is a Pandora's Box -- some of the questions it proposes are painful and disturbing (like "what is space?", for instance), but have been overlooked long enough. To paraphrase Morpheus in the movie "The Matrix", "you can take the blue pill, and believe whatever you like, or you can 'read the little red book', stay in Wonderland, and I'll show how deep the rabbit hole goes..."

If the architecture of Frank Gehry, has been described as a movie composed entirely of special effects, then Tschumi's is like special effects that don't quite come off. Herbert Muschamp, the modernist cheerleader who is the architecture critic for the NY Times, began his review of Tschumi's Lerner Student Center at Columbia University by saying "By now, everyone knows that Bernard Tschumi's new Lerner Hall is a dud." And City Journal described his work as ""an agitated, irrational mix of limestone, brick, metal, and glass... giving the impression of a building on the edge of a nervous breakdown." Journalist Robert Locke has written, ""Tschumi's theoretical writings, the basis of his reputation, are a tangled mess that alternately induces dizziness and puzzlement as to whether the author actually knows what philosophy is, or merely heard it described by someone in a bar once ...... The worst of this stuff is so self-evidently empty as to defy attack". - It only remains for you to ask yourself whether you are one of those fools who will be taken in by this confidence trickster who has ruined the cities we live in, or whether you will move on to more intelligent reading. [Hint: Try Louis Kahn. It's a good start!]

This book was required for our studio (third year), and I am very glad that it was. I found it to be thought-provoking and helpful to my studio project.

Bought this for university studies and very happy with it. Recommended to me by my tutor and I would recommend it to any architecture student looking at 'transcribing' architecture.

Nothing is worst in Architecture than a book by an Architect who is in love with himself.This book is near unreadable, while one can tolerate a writer like Jonathan Meades who uses his large vocabulary effectively, with Tschumi I cannot help but feel he is just using big words to show off and dose not really grasp the meaning of at least half of them anyway. Good architectural writing is easily readable, it does not hide behind a cloak of pretentious buzzwords and meaningless non sentences unless it has something to hide.What's more despite all his writing his actually buildings are utterly dire. His Columbia university building is like a provincial leisure centre by an architect who thinks he's far cleverer than he really is. It is all show off spaces that are not that impressive and dark dank corners to hide all the people in.While some may argue his actual buildings are irrelevant to his writing, after all Robert Venturi was a terrible architect as well, but a great writer. However with Tschumi's writing the same self satisfied smugness is present that is in his buildings, the sense all he's really doing is thinking without a connection to reality in a field that really needs that connection to the real world.Without that connection then the writing becomes more like philosophy but Tschumi is no Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant or even Alain de Botton. A footballer who picks up the ball does not instantly become a good rugby player nor does a architectural writer become a good philosopher because he thinks more philosophicallyThis kind of writing on architecture is becoming deeply unfashionable and I can only rejoice. There is a real world to think about that is far more interesting and far more reinvent to architecture.