architectural meaning, as it has been bequeathed to us and as we still inhabit it. We
should not avoid the issue: if this configuration presides over what in the West is called
architecture, do these folies not raze it to the ground? Do they not lead back to the desert
of anarchitecture, a zero degree of architectural writing where this writing would lose
itself, henceforth without finality, aesthetic aura, fundamentals, hierarchical principles or
symbolic signification, in short, in a prose made of abstract, neutral, inhuman, useless,
uninhabitable and meaningless volumes?
Precisely not. The folies affirm, and engage their affirmation beyond this ultimately
annihilating, secretly nihilistic repetition of metaphysical architecture. They enter into the
maintenant of which I speak; they maintain, renew and reinscribe architecture. They
revive, perhaps, an energy which was infinitely anaesthetized, walled-in, buried in a
common grave or sepulchral nostalgia. For we must begin by emphasizing this: the
charter or metaphysical frame whose configuration has just been sketched was already,
one could say, the end of architecture, its ‘reign of ends’ in the figure of death.
This charter had come to arraign the work, it imposes on it norms or meanings which
were extrinsic, if not accidental. It made its attributes into an essence: formal beauty,
finality, utility, functionalism, inhabitable value, its religious or political economy—all
the services, so many non-architectural or meta-architectural predicates. By withdrawing
architecture maintenant—what I keep referring to in this way, using a paleonym, so as to
maintain a muffled appeal—by ceasing to impose these alien norms on the work, the
folies return architecture, faithfully, to what architecture, since the very eve of its origin,
should have signed, The maintenant that I speak of will be this, most irreducible,
signature. It does not contravene the charter, but rather draws it into another text; it even
subscribes to, and directs others to subscribe to, what we will again call, later, a contract,
another play of the trait, of attraction and contraction.
A proposition that I do not make without caution and warnings. Still, the signal of two
red points:
- These folies do not destroy. Tschumi always talks about
‘deconstruction/reconstruction’, particularly concerning the folie and the generation of
its cube (formal combinations and transformational relations). What is in question in
The Manhattan Transcripts is the invention of ‘new relations, in which the traditional
components of architecture are broken down and reconstructed along other axes’.
Without nostalgia, the most living act of memory. Nothing, here, of that nihilistic
gesture which would fulfil a certain theme of metaphysics; no reversal of values aimed
at an unaesthetic, uninhabitable, unusable, a-symbolical and meaningless architecture,
an architecture simply left vacant after the retreat of gods and men. And the folies—
like la folie in general—are anything but anarchic chaos. Yet without proposing a
‘new order’ they locate the architectural work in another place where, at least in its
principle, its essential impetus, it will no longer obey these external imperatives.
Tschumi’s ‘first’ concern will no longer be to organize space as a function or in view
of economic, aesthetic, epiphanic or techno-utilitarian norms. These norms will be
taken into consideration, but they will find themselves subordinated and reinscribed in
one place in the text and in a space which they no longer command in the final
instance. By pushing ‘architecture towards its limits’, a place will be made for
‘pleasure’; each folie will be destined for a given ‘use’, with its own cultural, ludic,
pedagogical, scientific and philosophical finalities. We will say more later about its
Rethinking Architecture 310