Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de La Villette as reinvention of the concept of territory: “Follies” as a dispersed and differentiated reality

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, shed light on the disjunction between code and territory, sustaining that “[t]he territory arises in a free margin of the code, one that is not indeterminate but rather is determined differently” and draw a distinction between milieu and territory. They also explain how “perpetual transcoding between milieus”, which each one is characterised by its one code, takes place and highlight that the territory emerges through a process of decoding. My paper departs from the disjunction between code and territory and the distinction between milieu and territory, as understood by Deleuze and Guattari, in order to inter-pret how the notions of territory and program were interrelated in the case of the entry to the competi-tion for the Parc de La Villette by Bernard Tscumi. Particular emphasis is placed on Tschumi’s inten-tion to “distribute programmatic requirements across the entire site in a regular arrangement of varia-ble intensity points, referred to as ‘Follies’”. The central gesture of Tschumi’s design for the Parc de La Villette was the method of superimposition of lines, points and surfaces. The system of points, lines and surfaces in La Villette and the “combinatoire” used for the “Follies” aimed to promote a non-hierarchical transformative language, and to relativizing the preeminence of form rendering it (the form) the result of the “combinatoire”. Special attention is paid to Tschumi’s use of the grid as common denominator that serves to activate the objects that are superimposed. The main objective of the pa-per is to explain how the above-mentioned design strategies of Tschumi are related to the way he understands the concepts of territoriality, exterritoriality, exterritoriality and their relationships.