undoubtedly undergoes this trial of the monumental moment; however, it inscribes it, as
well, in a series of experiences. As its name indicates, an experience traverses: voyage,
trajectory, translation, transference. Not with the object of a final presentation, a face-to-
face with the thing itself, nor in order to complete an odyssey of consciousness, the
phenomenology of mind as an architectural step. The route through the folies is
undoubtedly prescribed, from point to point, to the extent that the point-grid counts on a
programme of possible experiences and new experiments (cinema, botanical garden,
video workshop, library, skating rink, gymnasium). But the structure of the grid^2 and of
each cube—for these points are cubes—leaves opportunity for chance, formal invention,
combinatory transformation, wandering. Such opportunity is not given to the inhabitant
or the believer, the user or the architectural theorist, but to whoever engages, in turn, in
architectural writing: without reservation, which implies an inventive reading, the
restlessness of a whole culture and the body’s signature. This body would no longer
simply be content to walk, circulate, stroll around in a place or on paths, but would
transform its elementary motions by giving rise to them; it would receive from this other
spacing the invention of its gestures.
PART ELEVEN
The folie does not stop: neither in the hieratic monument, nor in the circular path. Neither
impassibility nor pace. Seriality inscribes itself in stone, iron or wood, but this seriality
does not stop there. And it had begun earlier. The series of trials (experiments or artist’s
proofs) that are naively called sketches, essays, photographs, models, films or writings
(for example, what is gathered together for a while in this volume) fully belongs to the
experience of the folies: folies at work. We can no longer give them the value of
documents, supplementary illustrations, preparatory or pedagogical notes—hors
d’oeuvre, in short, or the equivalent of theatrical rehearsals. No—and this is what appears
as the greatest danger to the architectural desire which still inhabits us. The immovable
mass of stone, the vertical glass or metal plane that we had taken to be the very object of
architecture (die Sache selbst or the real thing), its indisplaceable effectivity, is
apprehended maintenant in the voluminous text of multiple writings: super-imposition of
a Wunderblock (to signal a text by Freud—and Tschumi exposes architecture to
psychoanalysis, introducing the theme of the transference, for example, as well as the
schiz), palimpsest grid, supersedimented textuality, bottomless stratigraphy that is
mobile, light and abyssal, foliated, foliiform. Foliated folly, foliage and folle [mad] not to
seek reassurance in any solidity: not in ground or tree, horizontality or verticality, nature
or culture, form or foundation or finality. The architect who once wrote with stones now
places lithographs in a volume, and Tschumi speaks of them as folios. Something weaves
through this foliation whose stratagem, as well as coincidence, reminds me of Littré’s
suspicion. Regarding the second meaning of the word folie, that of the houses bearing
their signers’ name, the name of ‘the one who has had them built or of the place in which
they are located’, Littré hazards the following, in the name of etymology: ‘Usually one
sees in this the word madness [folie]. But this becomes uncertain when one finds in the
texts from the Middle Ages: foleia quae erat ante domum, and domum foleyae, and folia
Johannis Morelli; one suspects that this involves an alteration of the word feuillie or
feuillée’ [foliage]. The word folie has no common sense anymore: it has lost even the
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