Tschumi Le Fresnoy: Architecture In/betweenConceived for new art forms of the twenty-first century, Bernard Tschumi's Le Fresnoy, the National Studio for Contemporary Arts in Tourcoing, France, is part experimental art laboratory, part multimedia production center, part school, part cinema and exhibition and performance space. This highly celebrated building defies categorization, encouraging crossovers between architectural programs and art forms. A huge, technologically advanced roof covers both existing and recent construction, housing the renovated spaces of a former entertainment complex built in the 1920s. In Tschumi's remarkable building, the "in between" or residual spaces located between the existing tiled roofs and the new, hovering steel structure punctuated by glass "clouds" becomes a place where artists can take cover. Much as Tschumi invented a new concept of urban park with his Parc de la Villette in Paris, he brings to Le Fresnoy an innovative concept about the spaces generated by collisions between forms, programs, and the varied systems of contemporary culture. A group of essays by authors including Sylviane Agacinski, Alain Guiheux, Alan Fleischer, and Sylvia Lavin, among others, provides a theoretical and historical context. Extensive photographs and illustrations document the design, construction, and completion of this most polemical of new buildings. |
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aesthetic Alain Fleischer Archigram architects architectural project Archizoom art school Bauhaus Bernard Tschumi Boulogne-Billancourt boxes Branzi building built form Centre Georges Pompidou cinema collages conceived concept concrete construction Contemporary Arts contractor Coop Himmelb(l)au criticism critique developed disjunction Dominique Rouillard edifice envelope event exhibition existing expression facade fiction foundation France Frederick Kiesler Fresnoy project function future grid grid-pattern hall hangar heating and ventilation Hollein idea imagine in-between installation institution invention isotropy Joseph Abram Kiesler Le Corbusier Le Fresnoy longer machine Manhattan means megastructural movement National Studio Nigel Coates No-Stop City notion object Parc Paris pedagogical project Peter Cook plastic arts play production question Radical Architecture relation Rem Koolhaas roof situationist space-machine staircase steel strip structure Studio for Contemporary Superstudio surface Suspended House technical tion Tourcoing traditional transformed Tschumi's architecture urban utopia Véronique Descharrières Villette visual culture walls Walter Pichler