The Ultimate Erotic Act On The Performat

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‘The Ultimate Erotic Act’:
On the Performative
in Architecture
Mechtild Widrich
Do architectural photographs ever include runners, fighters, lovers?

Bernard Tschumi, ‘Violence of Architecture’, 1981
The new Acropolis Museum in Athens, designed by Bernard Tschumi (with

Michael Photiadis) and opened in 2009, is elevated on pilotis to conserve
an archaeological site discovered during the course of construction. But
perhaps the most remarkable showpiece in the museum consists in the
transparent floors (and ceilings) that allow for a view of visitors walking
above from below (Fig. 11.1). The very real voyeurism of seeing under-
neath dresses and skirts reminds me of the small Biedermeier figurine my
parents have at home (Fig. 11.2): a mirror positioned beneath the feet of the
beautiful porcelain dancer allows one to see the carefully arranged layers of
lacy underskirts. Of course, there is more to the experience in Athens than
erotic dreams come true: the glass panels are held in place by a heavy grid
of dark cross-beams that stand out in the Mediterranean light, framing the
action into a moving image. This framing works both ways – we can look
down from above to see antique fragments and statues or engage visually
with visitors below, both parties watching one another and the artefacts.
The Acropolis also participates in this play – it is prominently staged for the
eyes of museum visitors looking out through the glass walls on the top floor
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‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

Fig. 11.1 Inside Bernard Tschumi’s Acropolis Museum, Athens. Photo by
author.
of the museum. Framed by the see-through architecture and the occasional

colossal column, we walk and watch, separated by heavy glass, with the
strange changes in perception that these episodes of framing and isolation
bring about, an experience which recalls Manfredo Tafuri’s description
of Mies van der Rohe’s house-dwellers as performing a pantomime.1 A
metaphorical play on the act of digging is also at work: in looking up at other
museum visitors, we take on the surprised upward gaze of the excavated past
on the modern space encroaching upon it.2 Frame and movement, event
and exposition, all are central to the design of this museum, conceived by an
architect who rose to international prominence for his Derrida-influenced
grids in the Parc de la Villette in Paris (1984–87), but who attracts more
interest today for his early theoretical and pictorial output advocating an
event architecture.3
From the vantage point of the present, Tschumi has staked his whole
career on a preference for event over object and space over sign – a
pair of emphases that seem to point in different directions, as does his
love/hate relationship to architectural post-modernism. Both concerns
inform his early manifestoes, especially his Manhattan Transcripts of 1976–81
(a work often compared to Rem Koolhaas’s Delirious New York of 1978).
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PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE
Fig. 11.2 Biedermeier Figurine. Photo by author.
This collection of drawings remains in many ways his most distinctive

output: a precedent to which Tschumi, in the twenty-first century, still
explicitly and self-consciously compares his museum in Athens.4 There is
a paradoxical dimension to the inventive stream of posters and storyboards
Tschumi created in the late 1970s and early 1980s; they invariably insist
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on the anarchic, lived power of space and architecture, yet this power
is conveyed to us (if at all) in paper and text constructions.5 Anxious to
distinguish himself from Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in their
built projects and their book Learning from Las Vegas, Tschumi insisted
that architectural post-modernism misdiagnosed the failure of modernist
function: the problem is not that architects have nothing to contribute to
daily life through building programs, but only that they cannot dictate the
course of events that take place within their buildings. From the point
of view of recent scholarship on Venturi and Scott Brown, the purely
negative thesis attributed to them might seem a misreading, but their
emphasis on communication through surface symbolism may plausibly be
read, as Tschumi did, as a theoretical reduction of space to surface: they
see the modernist unified exterior, and the unified interior, as mere ‘space
ornament’, both wasteful and obscure as iconographic programme. Their
practical counter-proposal was to place commercial signage atop cheap
functional structures (‘decorated sheds’).6 To Tschumi, this stance seemed
not just politically complacent, but aesthetically unambitious as well. He
contended that the reduction of space to surface and sign shortchanged
architecture’s power to shape human life through the design of space as
a dense, lived reality, a power he equated not with the technocratic control
of human function, but with the setting of a stage for unique, unpredictable,
and transgressive acts.
Tschumi’s manifestoes are thus connected to the post-1968 discourse on
the social construction of space, with its focus on dwellers, walkers, and
actors – an active exploration and shaping of the environment by its inhabi-
tants. These debates were especially prevalent in France and Switzerland,
both of which claim Tschumi as their citizen. Switzerland, though less
dominated by New Left Marxism with its focus on the critique of everyday
life, was the home of sociologist and urban theorist Lucius Burckhardt,
the first translator of Learning from Las Vegas and the eventual inventor of
Promenadologie, ‘the art of walking’, recently reintroduced to architectural
discussions by Hans Ulrich Obrist at the 2014 Venice Architectural Bi-
ennale.7 Salient figures in France were above all the social theorists Henri
Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, and Louis Martin has shown the influence
of the authors of the Tel Quel Group on Tschumi’s ‘architectural eroticism’
in the vein of Bataille.8 But there is more to Tschumi than spatial utopianism
and the erotics of deconstruction; what connects the Manhattan Transcripts
to projects like the Acropolis Museum is a conviction that space and the
events taking place in it are linked – the ways to intervene in one are ways
to intervene in the other. This, as we will see, links him also to recent
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thinking about performance in architecture, but to see how, I first examine

the consistency of Tschumi’s thinking in this regard.
The Athens museum comes thirty years after the manifestoes, and is a
solid, by no means revolutionary building. But the shift is not just, I believe,
from page to object. The interest in rhythm and notation, sequence and
drama, survive through the use of transparency and opacity in Athens, as
does the confrontation of visitors through diagrams and frames. But with
this consistency comes a problem, one that affects not just Tschumi but all
art and architecture that claims to be in the service of anarchic events: how is
one to plan the unforeseeable?9 If the disruptive, unpredictable, transgressive
event takes place in real space, if city, building, and body are indispensable
to the event, then how can books, or pen and paper, even supplemented by
photography, conceptualize (not to mention actually bring about) spatial
change? Tschumi certainly thinks they do, for he invested much time in
aesthetic methods of conceptualization that he insists are not just decorative.
Image and action are at stake here, and with them the opposition, perhaps
prejudicial, of active, real, participation in space versus the passive, mediated,
consumption of space in images. If Tschumi wants to rescue the tools of
mediation – the plan, the collage, the concept – from second-class status
and assert their centrality to architecture as an avant-garde practice, to do
so he relies again and again on powers he attributes not to these tools but
to encounters in real space.
Performing Spaces, Performing Words

A way out of this dilemma is to approach the conception of space, event,
and movement from the theoretical framework of performance. This might
seem counterintuitive, because performance appears, at least from the stand-
point of space and event, to be derivative: surely there are events in space
before there is any bodily performance art.10 Perhaps. But performance art
need not be body art, and as such can function, I will argue, without ‘real’
events. And when it does enter space in the form of bodies performing,
performance art brings with it the conceptual link between image and action
that Tschumi relies on without spelling it out.11
There is also a compelling biographical connection in the 1970s be-
tween Tschumi and the founder of modern performance studies, RoseLee
Goldberg.12 Her 1979 book Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present
gave performance an art-historical genealogy in Dadaism, Futurism, and
Bauhaus theatre. Goldberg was director of the Royal College of Art Gallery
while Tschumi taught at the Royal College.13 In 1975, they co-curated an
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exhibition entitled A Space: A Thousand Words. This show concentrated on
the intersection of art and architecture in conceptual practices. Because of
this focus, and possibly also due to low funds, they presented the exhibition’s
30 projects in a restrained style: photographs or plans and a short text, all in
one room. The accompanying catalogue, pointedly claimed to be ‘identical
to the exhibition’ in an essay by Goldberg, simulates the format of the
exhibition space, printing an image with text below it for all 30 projects.14
In her preface to the catalogue, Goldberg self-consciously emphasized
‘the inherent ambiguity of the discussion on space, since here [on paper –
MW.] space is presented in a two-dimensional way. The viewer, rather
than being subjected to real space, is given glimpses into different spatial
possibilities – landscapes or mindscapes.’15 Apart from this preface, there is
also a one-page programmatic text by Tschumi, followed by the individual
contributions, arranged in alphabetical order by first name, as well as the
letter sent to potential participants outlining the concept and display condi-
tions of the exhibition. In his own text, Tschumi asserts the inseparability
of theoretical concept and real space. On one hand he insists that against
the metaphorical uses of the word ‘space’ and its reduction to ‘the mere
product of the socio-economic structure’, space simply is. It is hard not to
read here a rejection of Henri Lefebvre’s La Production de l’espace (1974),
understood or misunderstood as a reductive thesis about space being an
effect of social practice.16 On the other hand, Tschumi insists that ‘spatial
concepts have been made by the writings and drawings of space rather than
by their built translations.’ In other words, when it comes to conceptualizing
space, thinking, writing, drawing, and discourse have the upper hand, both
in their flexibility and radicality, over literal use of space, with its practical
difficulties. ‘The magic of space,’ Tschumi concludes, ‘is inseparable from its
theoretical discourse.’17 And yet, the very same year, in an article published
in Studio International right after Goldberg’s ‘Space as Praxis’, Tschumi warns
sternly: ‘The concept of dog does not bark; the concept of space is not in
space.’18
The ambiguity of Tschumi’s 1974 texts mirror the ambiguities, noted
above, of his practice in general. This is particularly true of his doctrine of
planning for unforeseen events, a method that makes urgent the distinction
between mental and real space, along with an account of how to bridge
the two. His own contribution to the exhibition, Fireworks (later reprinted
as Manifesto 1) voices what was to become his master theme of pleasure in
useless excess: ‘Striking a match for no other reason to see it aflame you get
a good idea of the gratuitous aspect of good architecture.’19
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Transformations
Manifesto 1’s image of striking a match is an eloquent clue to how planning
the unpredictable works in Tschumi: but that is does work, and has a
place in architecture besides such ephemeral gestures, is an opinion that
came to be widely shared first in the 1980s, and has gained theoretical
credibility only over the last decade. The terms ‘performative architecture’
and ‘performance architecture’ have surfaced prominently in recent years,
but they have also been applied to starkly varying practices. Performance
architecture often means today an extended idea of stage design, in which
space, event, and temporary design interventions come together with
immaterial elements like lighting, atmosphere, and patterns of movement.
The first graduate programmes in performance architecture were founded in
Australia and more recently in Britain; while not my main concern, I return
to this practice briefly below.20 As for performative architecture, though
there are competing definitions, architects have used the term ‘performative’
primarily for materials that have the ability to adapt or change, often in ways
that reflect organic growth or allow for user interaction. Thus the Children’s
Hospital in Basel by Stump & Schibli Architekten changes colour from
yellow to orange and green and vice versa as one walks past, due to carefully
orchestrated light reflections, called an ‘animated façade’ (the animation is
provided entirely by the walker). Another project, developed by Sergio
Araya in Santiago de Chile, features bio-manufactured structural elements
that will grow and change with time in response to the metabolism of the
microbes that inhabit and produce it. Araya’s MIT dissertation outlining this
project is entitled Performative Architecture (2011).21 Without looking farther,
there are obvious similarities between these two fairly disparate usages. In
the first case – the expanded stage design of performance architecture –
architects or designers create spaces to act in, taking an interest in the
immersive quality of space, a synaesthetic approach of the Total Work of
Art that overwhelms us, possibly acts on us, or makes us act in turn. In the
second case, the building itself (its material, its surface) changes, making the
event one with the architecture. In certain cases, as in Basel, the changes
are not literally in the building at all but in the eye of the observer, but they
are physically caused by the materials used and thus may be attributed to
the building itself.
Are these two conceptions of the performative in architecture sufficient?
Would they help, for example, in understanding Diller + Scofidio’s Blur
(Fig. 11.3)? Designed for the Swiss Expo in 2002 at Lake Neuchatel in
Yverdon-les-Bains, the work consisted of a metal structure from which lake
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Fig. 11.3 Diller + Scofidio, Blur, 2001. Photo by Norbert Aepli. Creative
Commons Licence.
water was sprayed into the air, producing a huge cloud of fog that was ex-
perienced from the inside. ‘Entering Blur’, the catalogue proclaims, ‘is like
stepping into a habitable medium, one that is formless, featureless, depthless,
scaleless, massless, surfaceless, and dimensionless.’22 Applied to materials, as
per definition two, all of this is false: the cloud has form, depth, and scale,
and even if it doesn’t have a rigid exterior shell like a conventional building
(there was a conventional built scaffold, but that was not Blur), one could
describe the behaviour of the fog as precisely as one could measure a marble
palace. But that is beside the point. What the catalogue is getting at, and
falsely presenting as an issue of technology, is Blur’s theatricality, its effect on
the spectator.23 The experience of walking into Blur is one of disorientation
and formlessness. Indeed, the work’s amusement-park or perhaps national-
park functionality (there were employees distributing raincoats), its careful
calibration to weather conditions, and Diller + Scofidio’s planning of a
submerged sushi restaurant at the heart of the viewing platform all aim at a
synaesthetic, Gesamtkunstwerk experience of water in its many forms – water
as liquid and gas, protagonist and environment, or, put otherwise, as event
and as space. Blur consisted in these shifting configurations of inhabitants and
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built elements, above all the water cloud: as its creators kept repeating in
memo after memo, ‘Blur is not a building’. But if Blur is not a building,
neither is the water vapour: the cloud, far from being merely a space-
delimiting formal occurrence or the unconventional outer surface floating
atop a conventional metal scaffolding, gives the impression of a performance
in its opacity and shifts, creating an expectation of authentic, unpredictable
encounters. Architecture remains fascinated with anarchic experience in real
space, a form of wishful thinking it shares with performance art: we could
say that the difference between the two is that architecture works from space
to the body, while performance from the body into space.
Both stagecraft and eventful materials were at play in Blur: but it is
neither of the two alone nor their mere addition that explains what makes it
‘performative architecture’: rather, it is the fact that they work together to
form a genuine dramatic scenario. Blur is architecture that both stages – the
solid structure is essentially an observation deck – and takes the stage for its
own performance of the cloud. What binds these two aspects? Consider in
this context Tschumi’s memorably titled essay ‘Violence of Architecture’,
printed in Artforum in 1981: ‘There is no architecture without action,’
reads the first thesis.24 What kind of action? Tschumi does not say, but
immediately qualifies his thesis: ‘there is no architecture without events, no
architecture without programs’. This strongly suggests that programmes and
events are one. But the familiar equation of planning with the unforeseen
still remains to be explained. To do this, Tschumi goes on to describe
the entry of humans into space as violence: not necessarily destructive,
but necessarily erotic. Can erotic acts be programmed, be the subject matter
of an architectural program? In 1981, Tschumi is optimistic, for he sees
a necessary conceptual link between the program and event, like that
between ‘guard and prisoner, police and criminal, doctor and patient, [ . . . ]
hunter and hunted.’ The two things in all these cases, as he puts it, may
exist separately, but they only assume their specified roles on meeting,
in relation to one another. Another essay, published two years later by
the Architectural Association, yokes both formalist and social concerns to
this coexistence: ‘architecture – its social relevance and formal invention –
cannot be dissociated from the events that “happen” in it.’25
We are getting closer to the link between plan and space, between
program and event, in the symmetry between concept and object, but to
get there we need to get the ‘happen’ out of scare quotes. One way to
make sense of the literal connection of performance to architecture might
be to say that performative architecture focuses on use rather than form,
on dwellers taken as participants in space – that is, taken as such by other
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participants, or readers of architectural documents. To ‘take as’ is the essence
of the performative, a term from the philosophy of language used to denote
acts that change social reality by representing that reality in a certain way.26
In Tschumian terms, a declaration of love or war actually changes things
between people; it does not just tell us that it does so. And the link does
not just go from representation to reality: a speech act is legible as such
(and distinguished from, say, a simulated or staged one) by the effects it
has. A performative act is not just any event that takes place; it is one that is
intended and conceptualized as such, one that relies on social convention to
be understood and taken for what it is. As such, performatives in language,
life, and art maintain in balance descriptive and prescriptive contents, an
account of the world as it should be and of the way it shall be as a result of its
effect. Tschumi’s montage works are paradigm cases of this: the Manhattan
Transcript from which I have borrowed my title reads: ‘Architecture is the
ultimate erotic act. Carry it to excess and it will reveal both the traces of
reason and the sensual experience of space. Simultaneously.’27
One might think that written statements are particularly apt to combine
a command with a piece of speculative philosophy. But how can a building
be performative in this dual sense of prescribing and describing? A good
test case is Tschumi in Athens, where conventions of ‘good behaviour’ and
voyeurism meet, creating an interesting yet foreseeable change in the way
we look at visitors on other levels within the museum. As with the risqué
Biedermeier figurine, the glass floor-ceilings might be called instances of
a material performative: a planned configuration of space that places persons
near it in situations it foresees. That they may react unpredictably to the
provocation is a possibility, not a certainty. This is not meant as a criticism,
for what Tschumi has grasped, and what makes his architectural actionism
possible even as a programme, is that to have events at all one must be able
to identify and name what occurs. Paper and space go together after all.
A Choreographed Catalogue
Performative architecture, then, to be substantive, might need to be
performative in a literal sense. But how did Tschumi get there? One piece
of historical evidence that he did or should have done so is his proximity
to performance art, as Goldberg was curating and theorizing it in the
mid-1970s. Is his architecture, or a relevant subset of it, performative?
Looking more closely at performance art, which itself became an umbrella
term during the 1970s for various activities from body art to scripted
and improvised happenings, we might be able to get a better idea of the
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collaboration between Goldberg and Tschumi, and what this meant for
architecture and its subsequent performative turn.
Where to start this inquiry? A Space: A Thousand Words is not a bad
place: I already cited from it Goldberg’s evocative alternatives to built
space: ‘landscapes or mindscapes’. The catalogue entries range from paper
architecture to the ‘spatial analyses’ of Tschumi’s architecture students, from
Braco Dimitrijevic’s advertisement (well over a thousand words!) of his
marble monument to a passer-by in a London park to Peter Hutchinson’s
dry anecdote about recognizing art-historical landmarks by incidental details
in photographic slides (English churches are surrounded by foliage, French
churches by skylines, American churches by electrical wires). According to
Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, the first scholar to interpret Tschumi and his students
in terms of their collaboration with Goldberg, we should see the immense
influence of Goldberg on Tschumi in her promotion of experimental art
as a curator – besides art we would now call ‘performance’, her exhibitions
included Bernd and Hilla Becher, Christian Boltanski, Brian Eno, Piero
Manzoni, Anthony McCall, Christo and Jeanne Claude. But we should
also appreciate the conflict that emerges from pitting ‘the cerebral approach
favoured by Tschumi against an intuitive, performance-based practice that
Goldberg introduced to his students.’28 Issues of gender stereotype aside
(the cerebral male architect versus the intuitive female curator), Goldberg’s
early texts suggest that she gave quite a bit of the conceptual impetus to
Tschumi’s notion of ‘events’, ideas that he would later elaborate in texts of
the early 1980s like ‘Violence of Architecture’.
Let us then go to the source: Goldberg’s 1975 text ‘Space as Praxis’,
published just in the wake of the show in a special issue of Studio International
she co-edited with Tschumi. Leaving explicit architecture to her collabo-
rator, who published his ‘Questions of Space’ in the same issue, Goldberg
embarks on an ambitious and subtle taxonomy not of performance but of
conceptual art, emphasizing artists’ dissatisfaction with the ‘dematerialization
of art’ thesis.29 When in 1969 Seth Siegelaub, during a radio discussion
with several like-minded artists (some of whom he represented), tried to
define conceptual art as immaterial, ‘none of the artists agreed’.30 Goldberg
traces this disagreement not to Dada and Futurism, as she would in her
1979 book on performance, but to attempts of conceptual art to show the
materiality, indeed the concrete social force, of their ideas: performance, as
she memorably puts it, is ‘the materialization of theory’.31
Though Goldberg does not adopt the linguistic terminology of the
‘performative’, her notion of the embodiment of concepts as events in space
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(not necessarily involving bodies: minimalism and land art are also treated)
sets social force at the centre of performance and (what interested her more
at this point in her career) of conceptual art in general. This comes out in her
well-chosen examples, particularly as they were formulated in the periodical
Avalanche (eight of her 18 footnotes are to this magazine). For instance, in
the Fall 1972 issue, Acconci reminisced about being made to sing songs
at family gatherings as a child, printed transcripts of works with titles like
‘Performing a Sentence’ and ‘Performing a Space’.32 What draws together
these apparently acts of ‘performing’ material as ontologically diverse as a
space, a sentence, and a sentimental song is precisely the aim of embodying
a concept in space (often drawn or planned discursively in advance) and
paying attention to the resulting experience. These experiences, often
suggested by photographic documentation, might be imagined in turn. That
is to say, concepts can give rise to new concepts, rather than requiring
literal embodiment (this was after all Lawrence Weiner’s main point).
The conventional speech act plays a role in shaping this experience, but
Goldberg’s emphasis, like Tschumi’s, is on experience and the events that
take place in conceptualized space. What both seem to neglect, though
Goldberg is closer to saying it, is that the need for a viewer’s reception of
the concept to make the performance intelligible makes it effective even on
paper. The concept, therefore, has the potential to create a bridge from the
programme to the city.
This 1975 theory of performance as conceptual art is already a step
beyond the ‘body art’ view of performance as ephemera, limited to human
bodies in space and programmatically opposed both to planning and
capture in photographic media; in this view, performance art consists of
anarchic events differing from theatre by its spontaneity and the role of the
audience.33 This idealized claim of direct participation was an important
theoretical touchstone, particularly in the 1960s practices not yet called
performance. These often involved equating following directions with free
action, and discounting free action (which, in fact, often occurred) as
theatrical over elaboration. For instance, when one of the spectators cutting
away at Yoko Ono’s dress in Cut Piece (1965) seemed to threaten her
with the scissors, the artist did not applaud the anarchic gesture, nor did
she disapprove (at least officially) because she was threatened, but because
the gesture was too theatrical.34 The analogy to Tschumi and architecture
should be apparent: a naive notion of participation would be to get people
to follow explicit instructions and then celebrate this as eventfulness; a
more nuanced approach would take the performance of scripts or spatial
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possibilities offered by a plan and its various discursive dimensions (the

conceptual content of architecture as discussed in manifestoes, criticism,
etc.) as a practical means of architect-dweller interaction.
If performance studies today insist on what remains – the more or less
recent trend of investigating the afterlife of performance in documentary
films, photographs, relics, and so on – Tschumi’s writings have trouble
matching the slow temporalities of architecture to the human events that
‘happen’ in it (to restore his scare quotes).35 The aspect of time in built
space, of course, is not just a punctual one, but also cyclical, concerned
with repeated, habitual interaction between actor and environment. In this
sense, performance, in its recent historical turn, may have come closer to
architecture than the other way around. Indeed, in speaking of how the
unpredictable, transgressive violence of human action could become part
of the architect’s programme, Tschumi cites not just Bernini’s Counter
Reformation festivals and Albert Speer’s ‘sinister and beautiful rallies’, but
also the ramp directing traffic into Le Corbusier’s Carpenter Center at
Harvard and ‘reenactment[s] of the storming of the Winter Palace in St.
Petersburg’ (an enthusiasm revived recently by Slavoj Žižek).36 But the
spectre of non-erotic violence is always around the corner: Tschumi warns
of programmatic violence found in ‘slaughterhouses, concentration camps, or
torture chambers.’37 Tschumi’s insists, however, that it is conceptual space,
and conceptual violence, that interest him. In his own designs, since ‘the
reading of architecture was to include the events that took place in it’, modes
of notating it had to be developed, including ‘movement notation derived
from choreography.’38 Such notations, I am arguing, are far less plausible as
quixotic prescriptions of ‘real’, ‘unforeseeable’, ‘transgressive’ events than as
invitations to conceive events, works of conceptual art in their own right.
Glass
Finally, I’d like to ask: what is there for the architect to notate, and for
performers of architecture to do? Is there in architecture always a moment
of encounter, a performance repeated invariably by someone entering a
building? This is a question of time as well as of space: to answer it, I
turn to an early example of what is now called ‘performance architecture’.
Take a performance adaptation of Marcel Duchamp’s famous work The
Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass, 1915–23). In June
1987, Susan Mosakowski restaged the encounter between the bride in the
upper level of the work and the nine bachelors beneath, calling it The Rotary
Notary and His Hot Plate, the third part of her Duchamp trilogy. The play,
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commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, takes the Large Glass
out of its role as object of display, however fragile, and materializes it, as
it seems, in performance. Mosakowski worked in collaboration with Diller
+ Scofidio, who did not just design the set, but built prostheses for the
actors and staged the spatial encounter through barriers, extensions, and
projections.
The subtitle of the play is, tellingly, ‘Delay in Glass’. Who is delayed?
Duchamp? Is it the audience, latecomers to the wedding? We readers
today are even more delayed. Delay may be thought to bridge the recent
architectural embrace of performance and performance’s historical turn, a
turn resting on the self-conscious insight that for every view of the past
there is a belated audience inspecting that past through images, restaging,
or imagination. Goldberg did not ignore this, but took this for granted in
1975: indeed, it formed one of the main ways for the concept to enter space.
With the passing of time, more attention, and a more critical attitude to the
document, as distinct from the event, have proven practically necessary.
Performance, in other words, has learned to work through its temporality:
to critically examine, in text and photographic image, events that for all
their fugitiveness have been durably represented as occurring in a historical
moment. The extension to architecture is apparent, and must have been so
to Tschumi as he wrote ‘Violence in Architecture’, with its invocation of
architectural photographs: photography reconciles duration and one-time
action by encapsulating both in the durable reproduction of a moment. Just
think of the way Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial is mediated to an
international audience, which, whether it has visited the monument or not,
knows about its visitors reflected in the shiny black stone.
To see how this photographic capture involves a historical dimension
as well as an experience of the one-time event, however, requires acknowl-
edging the performative function of photography itself as the memorializa-
tion of acts, one Tschumi seems to repress in favour of the force of ‘real
space’ in his unguarded reference to the boredom of traditional architectural
photos. Tschumi himself, as a graphic artist, or better said, a conceptual
artist, is a master in manipulating the rhetorical force of reproductive media
to provoke viewer reaction: in 2012, he produced a critical contribution to
David Chipperfield’s Architectural Biennale in Venice, with its somewhat
anodyne theme of Common Ground (Fig. 11.4). ‘Common ground? Com-
monplace’, read one of Tschumi’s posters, contrasting colour photographs
of the Canale Grande with the Venice Hotel, Las Vegas. Other posters
paired the question ‘Common ground?’ with black-and-white contrasts of
the Guggenheim New York and a spiral parking ramp, and of Giuseppe
273
Fig. 11.4 Bernard Tschumi, Posters for the 2012 Venice Biennale Common
Ground. Photo by Sabine von Fischer.
Terragni’s Casa del Fascio with an empty square and with the fascist
crowd added in a famous photomontage. Tschumi’s commentaries read,
respectively: ‘Architecture is not only what it looks like, but also what it
does’, and ‘Architecture is not about the conditions of design but about the
design of conditions’.
With these 2012 declarations, we return to the core of performative
architecture as it was first formulated by Tschumi in the 1970s. But the
contrast of Fascist function and disfunction jars. Just what does it mean for
architects to design conditions? Is it to turn their backs on everyday use
and call forth unforeseen events, love and murder and the mass rally? Let
us return one last time to the catalogue of A Space: A thousand words. The
cover (Fig. 11.5) will suffice. On it we see an installation, presumably pho-
tographed before the opening: below the white walls with their photographs
and texts (‘precisely’ reproduced in the book) is a wilderness of what looks
like asphalt fragments, a ‘non-site’ resembling Robert Smithson’s gallery
installations: somewhere between archaeological dig, land art and collapsed
building, the uprooted earth or construction material a precursor of Walter
de Maria’s 1977 Earth Room in Manhattan, or an echo of Robert Morris’
formless works cited by Goldberg in ‘Space as Praxis.’ The exhibition’s
274

Fig. 11.5 Cover of exhibition catalogue A Space: A Thousand Words. Photo
by author.
materialized concepts, represented in the framed photos and texts, are linked
to the rubble by vertical dotted lines: as if they arise from formless space,
which at the same time they shape and articulate like signposts.
The shift from literal space to a space of conceptualized experience –
whether entered physically or merely conceived – is palpable in this
image. It shows that the performativity of architecture is more than a
phenomenology of walking or materials. Meaning, Tschumi claimed in
designing the Parc de la Villette, cannot be found in the design of a park
(or a building), but in the experience of the visitor – a formula that echoes
Derrida less than Goldberg.39 But this affirmation requires giving up the
myth that events (experiences) outrun our ability to conceptualize them. In
doing so, we might be less puzzled by the continued role of International-
Style modernism in global architecture today. Take the glass that Tschumi
uses to stage the Acropolis. In his 2012 book, The Art-Architecture Complex,
Hal Foster argues that combining old architecture with curtain glass leads
to the flattening of place into consumable images fit for Guy Debord’s
Society of the Spectacle.40 One wonders to what extent this thesis rests on
easy photographic access to buildings around the world: actually walking
into most glass-enclosed structures results in more than static images.
275
But one needn’t go Athens to see what is wrong with Foster’s argument.
The allegedly unconceptualizable events fashionably opposed to static
power structures have been over-discussed: they are firmly conceptualized
as events. Indeed, transparency is built into the concept of events, for we
simply look past the conceptual work that allows us to apply them to the
world and the potential events we imagine in our heads. But conceptual
work takes place nonetheless. And that insight is not mine alone. ‘Trans-
parency’ is the first word of Tschumi’s text in the Royal College catalogue:
‘Transparency may be the inherent quality of a substance, such as a glass
wall. Or, by extension, it may be the inherent quality of a spatial arrange-
ment, such as the crossing of a Renaissance church, whereby the planned
ambiguity of interpenetrating spatial layers becomes visible.’41 Or it may be
a way of entering a space, like the ruins and underpants on the Acropolis.
Performance partakes of form and material but is reducible to neither. Our
concepts can enter space in as many ways as events can take place in them.
Notes
1 Tafuri, Manfredo ‘Il teatro come città virtuale. Da Appia al Totaltheater’, Lotus
17 (December 1977), pp.30–53.
2 Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Conceptualizing Context’, in The New Acropolis Museum
(New York, 2009), p.84: ‘This relatively simple and lucid design concept
cannot account for the complex layering of chronological times and conditions
that the process of construction uncovered.’
3 See Tschumi, Bernard, Cinégramme folie: le Parc de la Villette (Princeton, 1987).
4 Tschumi: ‘Conceptualizing Context’, p.86: ‘The most revealing relationship
to the design of the New Acropolis Museum may be found in an early
drawing, The Street (from The Manhattan Transcripts, Part II, 1976–81), that
invokes the cinematic theory of montage.’ And see Aesopos, Yannis, ‘The New
Acropolis Museum: Re-making the Collective’, The New Acropolis Museum,
p.63: ‘To paraphrase Tschumi when referring to the (fragmented) narrative of
the Transcripts: Looking at the Frieze also means constructing it.’
5 As late as 1994, in reply to critics of two recently published books and
Museum of Modern Art retrospective, Tschumi faced the charge that his was
a ‘“paper architecture” – flashy images – although four of the five buildable
projects exhibited are either already built, in construction, or scheduled for
construction.’ Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Urban Pleasures and the Moral Good’,
Assemblage 25 (December 1994), p.7.
6 On the critique of modernist space as ornament, see Venturi, Robert, Denise
Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,
MA: 1977), especially the section pointedly titled ‘Space as God’, p.148.
276

Tschumi opposes post-modern attempts to ‘strip architecture again of its social,
spatial, conceptual concerns and restrict its limits to a territory of “wit and
irony”, “conscious schizophrenia”, “dual coding”, and “twice-broken split-
pediments”’ in ‘Architecture and Limits’, which appeared in three parts in
Artforum in 1980–1, and is reprinted in Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and
Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), p.105, and see also the explicit discussion
of Venturi at pp.229–31. For a reading of Venturi and Scott Brown’s non-
reductive understanding of space through film and movement, see Martino
Stierli, Las Vegas in the Rear Mirror (Los Angeles, 2012), esp. chapter 4. Scott
Brown in particular advocated the use of film in analyses of the city.
7 Burckhardt’s translation was published in 1969 in the journal Werk, before
the book even appeared in English, based on an excerpt that had appeared in
Architectural Forum 128, no. 2. I would like to thank Martino Stierli for this
information. See also Barzon Brock’s introduction in Burckhard, Lucius, Die
Kinder fressen ihre Revolution auf (Colone, 1985), p.11. Obrist’s 2014 Venice
Architecture Biennale project is called A stroll through a fun palace and honours
Burckhardt and Cedric Price. See http://www.prohelvetia.ch/fileadmin/
user upload/customers/prohelvetia/Programme/Biennalen/Mediendossier
140305/140305 E MM Pavilion of Switzerland at the 14th International
Architecture Exhibition - la Biennale di Venezia.pdf, accessed 8 November
2014.
8 Martin, Louis, ‘Transpositions: On the Intellectual Origins of Tschumi’s
Architectural Theory’, Assemblage 11 (April 1990), pp.22–35. On Tschumi’s
reception of Bataille, see note 29 below.
9 In a 2004 interview, Enrique Walked asked Tschumi how much his theories
were ‘operative’ in his designs. He replied: ‘I would say that my work is about
designing the conditions, rather than conditioning the design. In other words,
if I take a certain spatial condition and combine it with a certain programmatic
condition in a certain way, that relation might help me design the conditions
for an event to occur. But ultimately that will always be an unknown because
events are not predictable in any way.’ ‘Avant-propos: Bernard Tschumi in
Conversation with Enrique Walker’, Grey Room (17, fall 2004), p.119.
10 To take an instance before my eyes at the time of writing, here is a call for
papers for the 2015 College Art Association in New York with a focus on
‘performative architecture before the fact’.
11 I have argued this position in several articles as well as in my book Performative
Monuments. The Rematerialisation of Public Art (Manchester University Press,
2014).
12 Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi, A Conversation, ETH Zurich, May 5,
2011: the moderator of the evening, Stephan Trüby, suggested that a
‘performative turn’ within architecture could be found in the work of both
277
during the late 1970s. ETH Zurich, 2011, video available online, http://www
.multimedia.ethz.ch/episode play/?doi=10.3930/ETHZ/AV-75db5f75-5ff9-
41af-a221-c48ab14f8aa5, accessed 8 November 2014.
13 The biographical detail of this collaboration is not my focus, but rather the
theoretical exchange between Tschumi and Goldberg, which can be verified
in their publications of this period.
14 The catalogue itself is a challenging spatial experience: the text of each project
is printed sideways on the right page of each opening, ‘below’ the image at left,
so that one must turn the book around to read it, or leaf through it vertically.
15 Goldberg, RoseLee, ‘Preface’, in A Space: A Thousand Words, n.p.
16 The architect’s key text of the 1970s, Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Questions of
Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Architectural Paradox)’, Studio
International 190/977 (September–October 1975), pp.136–42, is respectful but
cool toward Lefebvre and Marxism: ‘This politico-philosophical critique has
the advantage of giving an all-embracing approach to space [ . . . ] But by giving
an overall priority to historical processes, it often reduced space to one of the
numerous socio-economic products that were perpetuating a political status
quo.’ Tschumi: ‘Questions of Space’, pp.137–8, and cf. note 3, p.139.
17 Tschumi, Bernard, ‘A Space is Worth a Thousand Words’, in A Space: A
Thousand Words, n.p. But Tschumi: ‘Question of Space’, p.140 cautions:
‘If it could be argued that the discourse about art was art and thus be
exhibited as such, the theoretical discourse about space certainly was not space.’
Interestingly, Tschumi in the sentence just previous to this credits Goldberg
with having shown that ‘there was no way in space to follow the Art-Language
practice.’ In other words, perhaps there is a caesura between theory and
experience in art as well as architecture.
18 Tschumi: ‘Questions of Space’, p.142. The theme of the whole article is the
difficulty of solving the ‘paradox of ideal and real space’ (p.142), manifested
practically in the architect’s predicament of ‘both questioning the nature of
space and at the same time experiencing a spatial praxis’ (p.137).
19 Tschumi: ‘A Space is Worth a Thousand Words’, n.p. Manifesto 1 is printed
in Bernard Tschumi. Architectural Manifestoes (London: Architectural Association,
1979), n.p., itself a reprint of Architectural Manifestoes, published by Artists’ Space
in New York in 1978. ‘Questions of Space’ concludes with what could be a
theoretical gloss on Manifesto 1: ‘Just as eroticism is the pleasure of excess rather
than the excess of pleasure, so the solution of the paradox is the imaginary
blending of the architecture rule and the experience of pleasure’ (p.142).
20 Besides such programmes, there is a working group headed by Rahel Leupin
and Dorita Hannah. I participated in the Second International Performance
Design Symposium in January 2014, organized by Hannah and Olav Harsløf
278

at the Danish Institute in Rome in January 2014 under the title Spacing
Performance.
21 Arraya, Sergio, Performative Architecture (Ph.D thesis, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, 2011). http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/68413?show=full,
accessed 8 November 2014. Arraya also called his panels ‘performative’ in a
lecture at the inaugural conference of the Art Architecture History Assembly
(AAHA) at ETH Zurich in May 2013.
22 Dimendberg, Edward, Diller& Scofidio + Renfro. Architecture after Images
(Chicago, 2013) p.144.
23 Dimendberg: Architecture after Images, p.155 asserts that ‘It [Blur] pushed archi-
tecture towards performance.’
24 Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Violence of Architecture’, Artforum, vol. 20, no. 1
(September 1981), reprinted in Tschumi: Architecture and Disjunction, pp.121–
137, this quote p.121.
25 Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Spaces and Events’, in Architecture and Disjunction, p.139,
originally published in Themes III. The Discourse of Events (London: Architec-
tural Association, 1983).
26 See J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words. The William James Lectures delivered
at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). The linguistic
detail is less important in this context than the coexistence of descriptive
and prescriptive elements in every performative. See Austin, pp.133–47 and
Widrich, Mechtild, ‘Memory in Action’, in Krzysztof Wodickzko, City of
Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, ed. Mark Jarzombek and Mechtild Widrich (London,
2009), pp.52–5.
27 Reproduced in Tschumi: Architecture and Disjunction, p.75, where it unfortu-
nately loses the full force of its striking colour photograph of the interior of
Le Corbusier’s decaying Villa Savoye, headed ‘Sensuality has been known to
overcome even the most rational of buildings.’
28 Kaji-O’Grady, Sandra, ‘The London Conceptualists. Architecture and Perfor-
mance in the 1970s’, Journal of Architectural Education 61/4, (May 2008), pp.43–
51. Kaji-O’Grady’s article and her earlier ‘The London Conceptualists: Archi-
tecture and Conceptual Art in the 1970s’, in Repenser les limites: l’architecture à
travers l’espace, le temps et les disciplines, INHA ‘Actes de colloques’, (Paris, 2005),
online at http://inha.revues.org/1773 (uploaded 3 November 2008, accessed
8 November 2014) are essentially the only work on the connection between
Goldberg and Tschumi.
29 Goldberg, RoseLee, ‘Space as Praxis’, Studio International 190/977 (September–
October 1975), pp.130–5.
30 ‘Space as Practice’, p.130.
31 Not that Goldberg in 1975 ignored the early twentieth-century avant-garde:
footnotes cite László Moholy-Nagy’s essay ‘Theatre, Circus, Variety’, and
279
Oskar Schlemmer’s “Mathematics of the Dance’, references made more familiar

in her 1979 book.
32 Acconci had just performed Seedbed at the Sonnabend Gallery in January 1972.
33 Goldberg cites from Acconci’s Avalanche interview a desire in Seedbed to ‘find
an alternative to live performance, because it seems that a power field can exist
without my physical presence . . . this interest hasn’t been totally devoid of an
art context. It’s always been how to make an exhibition area viable . . . to make
those spatial concerns “hard”.” ‘Space as Praxis’, p.132, citing Avalanche 6 (Fall
1972), p.76.
34 See Butler, Cornelia (ed), WACK!: art and the feminist revolution, exh. cat.
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (Cambridge, Mass., 2007), p.276.
35 On the archival turn in performance studies, see Widrich: Performative Mon-
uments, chapter 1, Giannachi, Gabriella, Nick Kaye, Michael Shanks (eds),
Archaeologies of Presence (London/New York: Routledge, 2012), and Ursprung,
Philip, Mechtild Widrich, Jürg Berthold (eds), Presence. A Conversation at
Cabaret Voltaire (Zurich, 2015).
36 Tschumi, Bernard, ‘Architecture and Limits’, Artforum, reprinted (with modi-
fications) in Architecture and Disjunction, p.125 (Speer is also discussed at p.118).
37 Tschumi: ‘Violence of Architecture’, p.134. Rather disconcertingly, the essay
ends with this sentence.
38 ‘At the same time, issues of notation became fundamental: if the reading of
architecture was to include the events that took place in it, it would be necessary
to devise modes of notating such activities. Several modes of notation were
invented to supplement the limitations of plans, sections, or axonometrics.
Movement notation derived from choreography, and simultaneous scores
derived from music notation were elaborated for architectural purposes.’
Tschumi: Architecture and Disjunction, p.11.
39 Blundell Jones, Peter, ‘1989 August: Parc de la Villette by Bernard
Tschumi Architects’, The Architectural Review, p.1, available online at http://
www.architectural-review.com/archive/1989-august-parc-de-la-villette-by-
bernard-tschumi-architects/8630513.article, accessed 8 November 2014.
Tschumi is cited as follows: “the follies, as built, are nothing but a moment
in the process of conception . . . abstract notations, meta-operational elements,
a frozen image, a freeze frame in a process of constant transformation,
construction and dislocation” (p.6, online edition).
40 According to Foster, the enclosure of the British Museum courtyard and the
dome of the Reichstag in Berlin, both designed by Norman Foster, transform
historic buildings into contemporary ‘attractions’ generating distraction. Foster,
Hal, The Art-Architecture Complex (London and New York, 2011), chapter 3.
41 Tschumi: ‘A Space: A Thousand Words’, n.p.
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The Ultimate Erotic Act On The Performat

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Do architectural photographs ever include runners, fighters, lovers?

The new Acropolis Museum in Athens, designed by Bernard Tschumi (with

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

of the museum. Framed by the see-through architecture and the occasional

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Fig. 11.2 Biedermeier Figurine. Photo by author.

This collection of drawings remains in many ways his most distinctive

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

thinking about performance in architecture, but to see how, I first examine

Performing Spaces, Performing Words

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

possibilities offered by a plan and its various discursive dimensions (the

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

‘THE ULTIMATE EROTIC ACT’

PARTICIPATION IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Oskar Schlemmer’s “Mathematics of the Dance’, references made more familiar

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