1981 |

Bernard Tschumi
Get with the Programme!
[in Architecture and Disjunction, MIT Press, 1994]

Dealing with the question of programme in architecture is like moving across a

treacherous minefield where untold battles have been fought to decide the primacy of
form or function. Whether it is an independent object or one with an historical affiliation,
architecture continues to evacuate the thing that inhabits it: the body in movement, the
event constantly moving on.
'Program: a descriptive notice, issued beforehand, of any formal series of
proceedings, as a festive celebration, a course of study etc. (...), a list of
the items or 'numbers' of a concert etc., in the order of performance; hence
the items themselves collectively, the performance as a whole ... ' (Oxford
English Dictionnary).
'An architectural program is a list of required utilities; it indicates their
relations, but suggests neither their combination nor their proportion.' (J.
Guadet, lments et thorie de l'architecture, Paris 1909)
To address the notion of the program today is to enter a forbidden field, a
field architectural ideologies have consciously banished for decades. Programmatic
concerns have been dismissed both as remnants of humanism and as morbid attempts to
resurrect now obsolete functionalist doctrines. These attacks are revealing in that they
imply an embedded belief in one particular aspect of modernism - the preeminence of
formal manipulation to the exclusion of social or utilitarian considerations [ ... ].
But let us briefly recall some historical facts [...], the program long
remained an important part of the architectural process [...]. The program's apparently
objective requirements by and large reflected particular cultures and values. [...]
Growing

industrialization

and

urbanization

soon

generated

their

own

programs.

Department stores, railway stations, and arcades were nineteenth-century programs

born of commerce and industry. Usually complex, they did not readily result in precise
forms, and mediating factors like ideal buildings types were often required, risking a
complete disjunction between 'form' and 'content.'
Under programme lies ideology
The modern movement's early attacks on the empty formulas of academicism
condemned these disjunctions, along with the decadent content of most beaux-arts
programs, which were regarded as pretexts for repetitive compositional recipes. The
concept of the program itself was not attacked, but, rather, the way it reflected an
obsolete society. Instead, closer links between new social contents, technologies, and
pure geometries announced a new functionalist ethic. At the first level, this ethic
emphasized problem solving rather than problem formulating: good architecture was to
grow from the objective problem peculiar to building, site, and client, in an organic or
mechanical manner. On a second and more heroic level, the revolutionary urges of the
futurist and constructivist avant-gardes joined those of early nineteenth-century utopian

social thinkers to create new programs. 'Social condensers', communal kitchens, workers'
clubs, theaters, factories, or even units d'habitation accompanied a new vision of social
and family structure. In a frequently naive manner, architecture was meant to both
reflect and mold the society to come.
Generative grammar
Yet by the early 1930s in the United States and Europe, a changing social context
favored new forms and technologies at the expense of programmatic concerns. By the
1950s modern architecture had been emptied of its early ideological basis, partially due
to the virtual failure of its utopian aims. Architecture also found a new base in the
theories of modernism developed in literature, art, and music. 'Form follows form'
replaced 'form follows function' [...].
Among confirmed modernists, the more conventional the program, the
better; conventional programs, with their easy solutions, left room for experimentation in
style and language, much as Karl Heinz Stockhausen used national anthems as the
material for syntactical transformations.
The form of content
The academization of constructivism, the influence of literary formalism, and the
example of modernist painting and sculpture all contributed to architecture's reduction to
simple linguistic components. When applied to architecture, Clement Greenberg's dictum
that content be 'dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature
cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything but itself... subject matter or content
becomes something to be avoided like a plague', further removed considerations of use.
Ultimately, in the 1970s, mainstream modernist criticism, by focusing on the intrinsic
qualities of autonomous objects, formed an alliance with semiotic theory to make
architecture an easy object of poetics.
But wasn't architecture different from painting or literature? Could use or
program be part of form rather than a subject or content? Didn't Russian formalism differ
from Greenbergian modernism in that, rather than banishing considerations of content, it
simply no longer opposed form to content but began to conceive of it as the totality of
the work's various components? Content could be equally formal.
Much of the theory of architectural modernism [...] was similar to all
modernism in its search for the specificity of architecture, for that which is characteristic
of architecture alone. But how was such specificity defined? Did it include or exclude use?
It is significant that architectural postmodernism's challenge to the linguistic choices of
modernism has never assaulted its value system. To discuss 'the crisis of architecture' in
wholly stylistic terms was a false polemic, a clever feint aimed at masking the absence of
concerns about use.
Walls and gestures
While it is not irrelevant to distinguish between an autonomous, self-referential
architecture that transcends history and culture and an architecture that echoes historical
or cultural precedents and regional contexts, it should be noted that both address the

same definition of architecture as formal or stylistic manipulation. Form still follows form;
only the meaning and the frame of reference differ. Beyond their diverging esthetic
means, both conceive of architecture as an object of contemplation, easily accessible to
critical attention, as opposed to the interaction of space and events, which is usually
unremarked upon. Thus walls and gestures, columns and figures are rarely seen as part
of a single signifying system. Theories of reading, when applied to architecture, are
largely fruitless in that they reduce it to an art of communication or to a visual art (the
so-called

single-coding

of

modernism,

or

the

double-coding

of

postmodernism),

dismissing the "intertextuality" that makes architecture a highly complex human activity.
The

multiplicity

of

heterogeneous

discourses,

the

constant

interaction

between

movement, sensual experience, and conceptual acrobatics refute the parallel with the
visual arts.
If we are to observe, today, an epistemological break with what is
generally called modernism, then it must also question its own formal contingency. By no
means does this imply a return to notions of function versus form, to cause-and-effect
relationships between program and type, to utopian visions, or to the varied positivist or
mechanistic ideologies of the past. On the contrary, it means going beyond reductive
interpretations of architecture. The usual exclusion of the body and its experience from
all discourse on the logic of form in a case in point.
The retun of the body
The mise-en-scnes of Peter Behrens, who organized ceremonies amidst the spaces of
Josef Maria Olbrich's Mathildenhhe; Hans Poelzig's sets for The Golem; Laszlo MoholyNagy's stage designs, which combined cinema, music, sets, and actions, freezing
simultaneities; El Lissitzky's displays of electromechanical acrobatics; Oskar Schlemmer's
gestural dances; and Konstantin Melnikov's 'Montage of Attractions', which turned into
real architectural constructions all exploded the restrictive orthodoxy of architectural
modernism. There were, of course, precedents Renaissance pageants, Jacques Louis
David's revolutionary ftes, and, later and more sinister, Albert Speer's Cathedral of Ice
and the Nuremberg Rally.
More recently, departures from formal discourses and renewed concerns for architectural
events have taken an imaginary programmatic mode. Alternatively, typological studies
have begun to discuss the critical 'affect' of ideal building types that were historically
born of function but were later displaced into new programs alien to their original
purpose. These concerns for events, ceremonies, and programs suggest a possible
distance vis--vis both modernist orthodoxy and historicist revival.