Maintenant, the word will not flutter like the banner of the moment, it will not introduce
burning questions: What about architecture today? What are we to think about the current
state of architecture? What is new in this domain? For architecture no longer defines a
domain. Maintenant: neither a modernist signal nor even a salute to postmodernity. The
post-s and posters which proliferate today (poststructuralism, postmodernism, etc.) still
surrender to the historicist urge. Everything marks an era, even the decentring of the
subject: posthumanism. It is as if one again wished to put a linear succession in order, to
periodize, to distinguish between before and after, to limit the risks of reversibility or
repetition, transformation or permutation: an ideology of progress.
PART THREE
Maintenant: if the word still designates what happens, has just happened, promises to
happen to architecture as well as through architecture, this imminence of the just (just
happens, just happened, is just about to happen) no longer lets itself be inscribed in the
ordered sequence of a history: it is neither a fashion, a period or an era. The just
maintenant [just now] does not remain a stranger to history, of course, but the relation
would be different. And if this happens to us, we must be prepared to receive these two
words. On the one hand, it does not happen to a constituted us, to a human subjectivity
whose essence would be arrested and which would then find itself affected by the history
of this thing called architecture. We appear to ourselves only through an experience of
spacing which is already marked by architecture. What happens through architecture both
constructs and instructs this us. The latter finds itself engaged by architecture before it
becomes the subject of it: master and possessor. On the other hand, the imminence of
what happens to us maintenant announces not only an architectural event but, more
particularly, a writing of space, a mode of spacing which makes a place for the event. If
Tschumi’s work indeed describes an architecture of the event, it is not only in that it
constructs places in which something should happen or to make the construction itself be,
as we say, an event. This is not what is essential. The dimension of the event is subsumed
in the very structure of the architectural apparatus: sequence, open series, narrativity, the
cinematic, dramaturgy, choreography.
PART FOUR
Is an architecture of events possible? If what happens to us thus does not come from
outside, or rather, if this outside engages us in the very thing we are, is there a maintenant
of architecture and in what sense [sens]? Everything indeed [justement] comes down to
the question of meaning [sens]. We shall not reply by indicating a means of access, for
example, through a given form of architecture: preamble, pronaos, threshold, methodical
route, circle or circulation, labyrinth, flight of stairs, ascent, archaeological regression
towards a foundation, etc. Even less through the form of a system, that is, through
architectonics: the art of systems, as Kant says. We will not reply by giving access to
some final meaning, whose assumption would be finally promised us. No, it is justly
[justement] a question of what happens to meaning: not in the sense of what would
finally allow us to arrive at meaning, but of what happens to it, to meaning, to the
meaning of meaning. And so—and this is the event—what happens to it through an event
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