Bernard Tschumi’s Parc de la villette is one of the most-mentioned pieces when talking about the implementation of Deconstruction discourse in architecture. In designing the park, he challenges the classical oppositions that think in terms of cause and effects. Architecture is
Just as Derrida shows us that any writings contain within themselves challenges to the very concepts on which they are based, so Tschumi hopes to show that in architecture ‘deconstruction of program’ challenges the very ideology on which the program itself based. This means dismantling the conventions of architecture by using the concepts derived from architecture itself.
Tschumi introduces different methods of deconstructing programs as follows:
CROSSPROGRAMMING: Using a given spatial configuration for a program not intended for it, i.e.: using a church building for a discotheque. This can be seen as a rejection of the typological approach in architecture. Programs of a town hall can be put in the configuration of a prison, or a museum in a car park.
TRANSPROGRAMMING: Combining two programs, regardless of their incompatibilities together with their respective spatial configurations.
DISPROGRAMMING: Combining two programs so that the required spatial configuration of one program contaminates the configuration of the other.
In designing the master plan for Parc de la Villette, Tschumi rejected conventional composition of built forms as well as the complete planning. Montage, a technique borrowed from film, was used to randomly juxtapose different elements (points, lines and planes) together. What interested him is the design that is flexible enough to accommodate constant changes of programs, as well as socio-political situation. In stead of a specific organization of different programs, Tschumi’s Parc is a superimposition of three different ordering systems of points, lines and planes. Each system is perfectly in order within itself, however when they are overlaid, one configuration starts to influence another. The result is a series of ambiguous intersection between systems …in which the status of ideal forms and traditional composition is challenged. Purity, perfection, and order become sources of impurity, imperfection, and disorder.(Wigley 1988) Also by allowing the co-existing of multiple, dissociated elements, it promotes a new kind of stability, an unstable stability.
Tschumi, moreover, acted on ‘a strategy of difference’. If other designer were to contribute to his Parc then it would be a ‘condition’ of their contribution that their projects differ from his follies (fig.4). Indeed their work would be successful only in so far ‘as they inject differences into the system. Tschumi aimed to present ‘an organizing structure that could exist independent of use, a structure without center or hierarchy, a structure that would negate the simplistic relationship between a program and the resulting architecture, or function and forms..
