OMA's Parc de La Villette and Perpetual Transcoding: The Diagram as Osmosis between Program and Territory

Abstract

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, shed light on the disjunction between code and territory. They sustain 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 presentation will aim to use the disjunction between code and territory and the distinction between milieu and territory, as understood by Deleuze and Guattari, in order to interpret how the notions of territory and program were interrelated in the case of the entry to the competition for the Parc de La Villette by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). Special attention will be paid to the way OMA treated the park as a programmatic entity. What constitutes the innovation of OMA’s proposal for the Parc de La Villette is the interconnection between territorial and programmatic aspects of the project through a common visualisation tool, which was the diagram of stripes. The main objective of the paper is to show how Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that functionality is a product of a territory, rather than the more conventional inverse becomes apparent in the proposal by OMA for the Parc de La Villette.