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BARCELONA (TUMBLING)
APARTMENTS
Luc Deleu: A project for Artforum
By Luc Deleu, Charles V Miller

LUC DELEU’S “BARCELONA (TUMBLING) APARTMENTS,” the

project for Artforum on the following two pages, is based on a submission
this Belgian architect and urban designer made to a competition for
Barcelona organized by the Colegio de Arquitectos de Cataluña in 1988. In Cover: Tom McGlynn and Emily Carter, I Love
N.Y., 1990, silk screen on paper, 23 x 20".
many regards, the submission is a summation of ideas that Deleu has From the street project and artists' book Your
House Is Mine, 1990-91, New York: Bullet
been developing over the last twenty years. More specifically, it relates to Space. Limited edition of 150.
his experience of the World Trade Center in New York, which he visited in
1980, and to his subsequent architectural model “Principle of a lesson in
OCTOBER 1991
scale with two buildings of identical volume, model showing Queen VOL. 30, NO. 2
Elizabeth I and II,” 1981. This model, extended in the unbuilt plan for ARCHIVE
Barcelona, opposes the themes of the vertical, waking state of being and
the horizontal, resting state—or, in more architectural terms, it reflects on
the basic tools of the plumb line and the level. A D V E RT I S E M E N T

The Barcelona apartments mirror the upside-down, inside-out, topsy-

turvy inversions of the post-Modern world, and transform that
multivalence into a new kind of functionality. They are intended as parts
of two identical buildings containing luxury apartments, a hotel, a car
“silo,” and a factory—for computer chips, of course. The apartments
“tumble” because, with the exception of the stair rails (which are colored
red in the photographs), they function both vertically and horizontally:
floors in the one become walls in the other. With more insidious

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BARCELONA (TUMBLING) APARTMENTS 03.05.24 16:57

distortion than a fun house mirror, Deleu’s apartments turn Newton on

his head.

Like all of Deleu’s projects, the Barcelona apartments constitute a

powerful spatial experience. Through reference, transposition, and
reflection they demonstrate that everything is the same—and that it is not.

—Charles V. Miller

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THE ANTI-AESTHETIC AT
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