La Imagen De La Ciudad

Bernard Tschumi - Six Concepts
Excerpt from Architecture and Disjunction
CONCEPT I: Technologies of Defamiliarization
In the mid-1970s small pockets of resistance began to form as architects in various parts of the world -- England,
Austria, the United States, Japan (for the most part, in advanced postindustrial cultures) -- started to take advantage
of this condition of fragmentation andsuperficiality and to turn it against itself. If the prevalent ideology was one of
familiarity -- familiarity with known images, derived from 1920s modernism or eighteenth century classicism -- maybe
one's role was to defamiliarize. If the new, mediated world echoed and reinforced our dismantled reality, maybe, just
maybe, one should take advantage of such dismantling, celebrate fragmentationby celebrating the culture of
differences, by accelerating and intensifying the loss of certainty, of center, of history.
In culture in general, the world of communication in the last twenty years has certainly helped the expression of a
multiplicity of new “angles” on the canonic story, airing the views of women, immigrants, gays, minorities, and various
non-Western identities who never satcomfortably within the supposed “community.” In architecture in particular, the
notion of defamiliarization was a clear tool. If the design of windows only reflects the superficiality of the skin's
decoration, we might very well start to look for a way to do without windows. If the design of pillars reflects the
conventionality of a supporting frame, maybe we might get rid of pillarsaltogether.
Although the architects concerned might not profess an inclination towards the exploration of new technologies, such
work usually took advantage of contemporary technological developments. Interestingly, the specific technologies -air-conditioning or the construction of lightweight structures or computer modes of calculation -- have yet to be
theorized in architectural culture. I stress thisbecause other technological advances, such as the invention of the
elevator or the nineteenth century development of steel construction, have been the subject of countless studies by
historians, but very little such work exists in terms of contemporary technologies because these technologies do not
necessarily produce historical forms.
I take this detour through technology because technologyis inextricably linked to our contemporary condition: to say
that society is now “about” media and mediation makes us aware that the direction taken by technology is less the
domination of nature through technology than the development of information and the construction of the world as a
set of “images.” Architects must again understand and take advantage of the use of such new technologies.In the
words of the French writer, philosopher, and architect Paul Virilio,”we are not dealing anymore with the technology of
construction, but with the construction of technology.”
CONCEPT II: The Mediated “Metropolitan” Shock
That constant flickering of images fascinates us, much as it fascinated Walter Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction. I hate to cite sucha “classic,” but Gianni Vattimo's recent analyses of the text has
indicated aspects that are illustrative of our contemporary condition. When Benjamin discussed the reproducibility of
images, he pointed out that the loss of their exchange value, their “aura,” made them interchangeable, and that in an
age of pure information the only thing that counted was the “shock” -- the shock of images,their surprise factor. This
shock factor was what allowed an image to stand out: moreover, it was also characteristic of our contemporary
condition, and of the dangers of life in the modern metropolis. These dangers resulted in constant anxiety about

finding oneself in a world in which everything was insignificant and gratuitous. The experience of such anxiety was an
experience of...