Week Two Summary: 'Architecture & Disjunction' 

This essay by architect and theorist Bernard Tschumi (1994) reflects on the 1970’s when he controversially argued that there is no architecture without spaces and events. He felt that architecture had become obsessed with stylistic concerns and was often reduced to an object or a glossy image in a magazine that you looked at instead of a place and the events that occur within it. His theory is that architecture is not defined by its form but by the way it weaves together space, movement and events. He discusses the interconnected concepts of program and movement. Program explores the activities and events that take place in a building, while movement charts the flow of bodies through spaces. He encouraged his students to explore and incorporate other genres such as art, dance, music, film and literature into their research. At the time he was criticised by his colleagues for this approach.