system must reduce them. Not for their political or militant content, but because, non-
extensible, non-explosive, non-generalizable, they are dangerous localizations, drawing
their uniqueness and their peculiar violence from their refusal to be a system of
expansion.
NOTES
1 One more thing undermines Beaubourg’s cultural project: the very mass of people that
swarms in to enjoy it (to which we shall return further on).
2 In relation to the critical mass and the radicality of its comprehension of Beaubourg, how silly
was the demonstration of the Vincennes students on the evening of the opening!AMERICA
NEW YORK
In New York there is this double miracle: each of the great buildings and each of the
ethnic groups dominates or has dominated the city—after its own fashion. Here
crowdedness lends sparkle to each of the ingredients in the mix whereas elsewhere it
tends to cancel out differences. In Montreal, all the same elements are present—ethnic
groups, buildings and space on the grand American scale—but the sparkle and violence
of American cities are missing.
Clouds spoil our European skies. Compared with the immense skies of America and
their thick clouds, our little fleecy skies and little fleecy clouds resemble our fleecy
thoughts, which are never thoughts of wide open spaces... In Paris, the sky never takes
off. It doesn’t soar above us. It remains caught up in the backdrop of sickly buildings, all
living in each other’s shade, as though it were a little piece of private property. It is not,
as here in the great capital New York, the vertiginous glass facade reflecting each
building to the others. Europe has never been a continent. You can see that by its skies.
As soon as you set foot in America, you feel the presence of an entire continent—space
there is the very form of thought.
By contrast with the American ‘downtown areas’ and their blocks of skyscrapers, la
Défense has forfeited the architectural benefits of verticality and excess by squeezing its
high-rise blocks into an Italian-style setting, into a closed theatre bounded by a ring-road.
It is very much a garden à la française: a bunch of buildings with a ribbon around it. All
this has closed off the possibility that these monsters might engender others to infinity,
that they might battle it out within a space rendered dramatic by their very competition
(New York, Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Toronto). It is in such a space that the pure
architectural object is born, an object beyond the control of architects, which roundly
repudiates the city and its uses, repudiates the interests of the collectivity and individuals
and persists in its own madness. That object has no equivalent, except perhaps the
arrogance of the cities of the Renaissance.
No, architecture should not be humanized. Anti-architecture, the true sort (not the kind
you find in Arcosanti, Arizona, which gathers together all the ‘soft’ technologies in the
heart of the desert), the wild, inhuman type that is beyond the measure of man was made
here—made itself here—in New York, without considerations of setting, well-being or
Rethinking Architecture 208