Species Niches performance pavilion. Courtesy Harrison Atelier.
performance AND ARCHITECTURE
ExpandEd FiElds
Architecture/Landscape/Performance
Cathryn Dwyre and Chris Perry
At first glance, one might consider architecture and performance to be anti-
thetical to one another, in so far as a building is generally characterized by
qualities of stasis and permanence while performance, understood here in
terms of movement, is its opposite, temporal and impermanent in nature. Cómo-
alguna vez, beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, the discipline of architecture
embarked on what has been at least a century-long experiment to embody and
express the dynamic qualities of movement. Por un lado, this experiment has
materialized in the form of literal movement in space — that is, the design of kinetic
building elements, such as flexible wall partitions, and an emphasis on representing
the less tangible aspects of architecture: the movement of bodies in space. Sobre el
other hand, it has materialized in a more figurative manner, as architectural form
eso, while static in nature, lends aesthetic expression to the dynamic qualities of
movimiento. Or as a building that, while fixed in place, might function as a vehicle
for engendering social and political forms of mobility.
In large part, this interest in temporality and impermanence at the turn of the twenti-
eth century had to do with broader technological, scientific, and socio-political influ-
ences. In addition to the Industrial Revolution, which introduced the machine and
with it a new cultural mindset characterized by speed, Einstein’s theory of relativity
was a revolution of another sort, a complete reconceptualization of the universe as
inherently relative and subject to perpetual change. Amid such technological and
scientific paradigm shifts, architecture commenced a re-evaluation of its fundamental
relationship to time. Contemporaneously, the social and political revolutions taking
place throughout Europe evoked qualities of movement, albeit in a more figurative
manner, compelling a new generation of architects to speculate on the capacity of
buildings to induce social change. En efecto, the term “social” entered architecture for
the first time during the modern movement, expanding the discipline’s traditional
discourse on material, geometría, and space, to include matters of use.
Although the Second World War interrupted this development, after which some
historians ventured to declare its technological and social manifesto a failure, a
second generation of modernists emerged in the 1950s and 1960s with a renewed
interest in the social potential of architecture, and with it qualities of temporality and
2 PAJ 109 (2015), páginas. 2–7.
doi:10.1162/PAJJ_a_00230
© 2015 Performing Arts Journal, Cª.
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impermanence. Similar to their predecessors, this second generation was inspired
by emerging technological and socio-political movements, which during the 1950s
included electronic media, computing, advertising, and a cultural climate characterized
by the implicit speed of mass production and consumption. In the 1960s, many of
these technological influences carried over into a new decade of anti-authoritarianism,
fueling a progressive period of social, cultural, and political change, which in its
challenge to the implicit stasis and permanence of tradition became expressive of a
figurative mobility in society. Comparable examples from the period can be found
within landscape architecture, wherein the design of public urban space by progres-
sive landscape architects, like Lawrence Halprin, often sought to empower rather
than constrain the user.1 As such, the design of public urban space in the sixties and
early seventies was conceived not as a mechanism for maintaining social order but
rather as a catalyst for producing new forms of social, cultural, and even political
agency at both individual and collective scales.2
It is from within this rich architectural lineage that Bernard Tschumi emerged in
the mid-1970s. Critical of the aesthetic mannerism and technological functionalism
associated with first as well as second generation modernists, Tschumi’s early work
might be viewed as a critical and much more conceptual expansion of the disci-
pline’s general desire to challenge conventions, first and foremost the traditional
assumption that architecture is a field identified principally with qualities of order,
stasis, and permanence.3 On the contrary, Tschumi’s theoretical projects from the
seventies celebrate qualities of disorder, temporality, and impermanence through a
critical reassessment of “architectural space,” drawing upon a wide range of extra-
disciplinary influences as a means of doing so, including art, actuación, cinema,
literature, and philosophy.4 For instance, his curatorial collaboration with RoseLee
Goldberg in 1975 on the exhibition A Space: A Thousand Words at the Royal Col-
lege of Art in London brought together participants from a diverse array of fields
to interrogate the word “space.” The exhibition explored the paradox inherent in
espacio: on the one hand the immaterial idea of space that exists as rational concept,
and on the other hand experiential, sensory space, existing as perceivable or “felt
volumen,” i.e. the body in space.5
This investigation provided a means through which to challenge and ultimately
rethink traditional definitions of “architectural space.” Typically defined by the con-
fluence of geometry and materiality in the articulation of a static three-dimensional
enclosure or volume, “architectural space” as understood through the alternative
lenses of dance, actuación, and cinema was reconceptualized by Tschumi in terms
of the intangible and transient qualities of movement as well as the potentially
transformative effects of use or in some cases misuse. As Tschumi writes:
Architecture and events constantly transgress each other’s rules, si
explicitly or implicitly. These rules, these organized compositions, may be
questioned, but they always remain points of reference. A building is a
point of reference for the activities set to negate it. A theory of architecture
is a theory of order threatened by the very use it permits. And vice versa.6
DWYRE and PERRY / Expanded Fields 3
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No longer static or predetermined, this was a definition of “architectural space”
characterized by dynamic and at times transgressive human activity.
Similarmente, Tschumi’s early theoretical projects beginning in 1976, which included The
Screenplays and The Manhattan Transcripts, questioned the conventions and care-
fully guarded traditions of architecture as a means of reimagining it, principally in
terms of proposing a newly transient and indeterminate urban architecture. In effect,
the emphasis was removed from the static object of architectural form and placed
instead on the dynamic body of its inhabitants, eso es, human activity or event: “Our
work argues that architecture — its social relevance and formal invention — cannot
be dissociated from the events that ‘happen’ in it.” 7 Sucesivamente, these early theoretical
projects laid the groundwork for Tschumi’s first major design commission, Parc de
la Villette in Paris, for which he won the international competition in 1983. Untra-
ditional in its approaches to both architecture and landscape, Tschumi’s design for
a large-scale urban park at the end of the twentieth-century seeks to challenge and
ultimately reimagine public space and by extension architectural and urban space.
Rather than constrain, determine, and stabilize conventional forms of use and mean-
En g, the park celebrates temporality, ambiguity, indeterminacy, and impermanence
at literal as well as conceptual levels. It was the overwhelming success of La Villette
as an important work of contemporary architecture and landscape that resulted in a
series of subsequent architectural commissions for Tschumi, including the celebrated
Le Fresnoy Art Center in Tourcoing, Francia, the architecture of which, according to
historian and critic Sylvia Lavin, “performs as a producer of fluid connective tissue
that stages the corporeal drama of contemporary life.” 8
This special section of PAJ on architecture, landscape, and performance is concerned
with our contemporary moment, specifically the ways in which the disciplines of
architecture and landscape architecture continue to engage aspects and qualities
characteristic of performance. Sin embargo, when considering the present it is useful to
reflect on the past, in part because one inevitably discovers that while the work of
the present may seem novel in many respects, it is inextricably linked to the issues,
challenges, debates, and ambitions of previous generations. In this respect, nosotros estafamos-
sider Tschumi to be an important figure within the discipline whose work and ideas
provide an historical bridge between the first and second generation of modernists
and our more recent period of architectural experimentation and production at the
turn of the twenty-first century. As a result, we begin by featuring an interview
with Tschumi before proceeding to the work of ten contemporary architecture and
landscape practices.
In our current age of digital communication technologies, the contemporary experi-
ence can be seen as one characterized by temporal flux, virtual space, velocidad, y
contingency. Norbert Weiner, a pioneer of cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s,
anticipated this technological and cultural shift, describing the future of human
experience as one increasingly defined by the dynamism and contingency of infor-
mation networks.9 Furthermore, we live in an age marked by the haunting effects
of climate change, and with it the growing instability of morphing environmental
4 PAJ 109
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condiciones. It is this existential threat — local, regional, and global in scale — that
provides a different kind of temporal flux characteristic of our age, one in which the
relationship between humans and nature, and by extension architecture and the
ambiente, has been fundamentally destabilized. It is precisely this environmental
and existential instability that has emboldened a new generation of architects and
landscape architects to question the relationship between the built environment and
the “natural” world, embracing rather than resisting the forces of change as a new
normal in the twenty-first century.
Diller Scofidio’s Blur Building pavilion, designed and built at the dawn of the new
century for the 2002 Swiss Expo, exemplifies such an approach. Working in collabora-
tion with EAR Studio and MIT’s Media Lab, both of which specialize in interaction
design and computing technology, the Blur Building combines a wide variety of
information and climate technologies, including a weather monitoring system, misting
infrastructure, and a wearable computing/sensing apparatus, which the firm labeled
a “braincoat.” Playing off “the cloud” as an artificial phenomenon (es decir., “cloud com-
puting” ), as well as a natural phenomenon (es decir., “the cloud” as weather system), el
overall effect is both a literal and figurative “blurring” of the definition of architecture
in any conventional sense of the term. Asimismo, it disturbs the traditional distinctions
between artificial and natural or architecture and environment: “Unlike entering a
building, the experience of entering this mass-less and elastic medium in which time
is suspended and orientation is lost, is like an immersion in ether.” 10
Even prior to the Blur Building, Diller Scofidio’s practice was highly interdisciplin-
ary, venturing into the territories of conceptual art, installation art, media art, y
performance as a means of rethinking architectural convention. Their collaboration
with The Builders Association on JET LAG, a media, theater, and performance
piece staged in 1998, is but one example. Similar to Tschumi, much of their early
experimental work in art, media, and performance eventually served to influence
their approach to the making of buildings. While the Blur Building might be seen
as situated somewhere between architecture, arte, and technology, an experimental
pavilion and thus not a “building” per se, the success of the project led to a series
of high profile architecture and landscape commissions, including the renovation of
Lincoln Center’s mid-century campus on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and
the conversion of the High Line, a former elevated industrial railway on the West
Side, into a vibrant public park.
In referencing Bernard Tschumi and Diller Scofidio’s early experimental work, nosotros
identify them as exemplars of the architect engaging aspects of performance as a
means of rethinking the disciplines of architecture as well as landscape. Such histori-
cal engagement with performance thinking on the part of architects and landscape
architects leads us to question what current practices could be seen as emblematic
de este enfoque. It is precisely this question that we address with the ten contempo-
rary practices selected for PAJ, each of which represents a new generation of design
experimentation invested in issues related to performance. Not unlike the Blur
Edificio, many of these practices engage both the motile human occupant and the
DWYRE and PERRY / Expanded Fields 5
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dynamic environment itself as the “players” in their performances.11 In this respect,
architecture and landscape are conceived as inherently flexible and responsive not
only to the changing pressures of human inhabitation and flow but also responsive
to the complex and often unpredictable dynamics of the environment. Such practices
include ANAcycle, Lateral Office, Future Cities Lab, WEATHERS, and Port.
Mientras tanto, other practices are more preoccupied with the challenges as well as
opportunities of the information age, a topic addressed by the Blur Building, produc-
ing experimental works of interactive architecture through the play of responsive
lighting, sound, robotic, and sensing technology. FoxLin, Liquid Factory, Minimaforms,
and Höweler + Yoon are four such examples.
Finalmente, still other contemporary practices engage the art of performance itself, stag-
ing interdisciplinary collaborations not unlike Diller Scofidio’s joint venture with The
Builders Association. Harrison Atelier is representative of this approach, as evidenced
in their recent architectural installation/performance piece, Species Niches, commis-
sioned by the OMI International Arts Center in upstate New York.
In selecting these ten design practices, each of which expand the field of architec-
ture as a means of redefining it, largely through the incorporation of external forms
of knowledge and expertise, we hope to establish a compelling lineage within the
architectural history outlined above, specifically the ways in which the disciplines
of architecture and landscape architecture have played with and continue to engage
aspects and qualities of performance.12 Much of the work featured in the follow-
ing pages operates at the relatively small scale of site-specific installations, both in
the context of cultural space (the gallery and sculpture park) as well as in public
espacio (the city). In this context, the projects can be viewed as more theoretical and
experimental in nature, and not unlike Tschumi and Diller Scofidio’s early work, ellos
lay the groundwork for large-scale architectural and landscape proposals to come.
NOTES
1. For more on Lawrence Halprin, including the influence of choreography on his approach
to the design of public space, due in large part to his wife Anna Halprin’s work in dance and
actuación, see his book RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (Nuevo
york: George Braziller, 1970).
2. An expanded view of social and political agency as it relates to urban renewal in Law-
rence Halprin’s work can be found in City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal
America, Alison Bick Hirsch (Mineápolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
3. See the introduction to Bernard Tschumi’s collection of essays, Architecture and Disjunc-
ción (Cambridge: CON prensa, 1996), 4–5.
4. Bernard Tschumi, “Questions of Space: The Pyramid and the Labyrinth (or the Archi-
tectural Paradox),” originally appeared in Studio International, September–October 1975
and was reprinted as the essay “The Architectural Paradox” in Architecture and Disjunction
(Cambridge: CON prensa, 1996), 40.
6 PAJ 109
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5. Tschumi’s discourse on space owes a debt to the 1920s notion of Raumempfindung
or “felt volume” articulated by Oskar Schlemmer: “The relationship of the ‘geometry of the
plane’ to the ‘stereometry of the space’ could be felt if one were to imagine ‘a space filled
with a soft pliable substance in which the figures of the sequence of the dancer’s movements
were to harden as a negative form.’” RoseLee Goldberg, Performance Art: From Futurism to
the Present (Nueva York: Thames and Hudson, 2011), 104.
6. Bernard Tschumi, “Violence of Architecture,” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge:
CON prensa, 1996), 133.
7. Bernard Tschumi, “Spaces and Events,” in Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge:
CON prensa, 1996), 139.
8. Sylvia Lavin, “Inter-Objective Criticism: Bernard Tschumi and Le Fresnoy,” in ANY 21,
How the Critic Sees: Seven Critics on Seven Buildings (Nueva York: ANYONE Corporation,
December, 1997), 34.
9. Norbert Weiner, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (Da Capo
Prensa, 1954), 8.
10. Diller Scofidio, “Blur: Swiss EXPO 2002 Diller Scofidio, Ear Studio, MIT Media Lab,"
in Assemblage, No. 41 (Cambridge: CON prensa, Abril, 2000), 25.
11. In his discussion on the cultural value of the play principle, Johan Huizinga articulates
a philosophy that underlies much of the contemporary work to which we draw your attention:
outside of so-called “ordinary life” in both space and duration, characterized by freedom or
the ability to opt-in, and impermanence born of motion and contingency. Johan Huizinga,
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Prensa de baliza, 1955), 3.
12. The term “expand” has its origin in Rosalind Krauss’s influential essay on interdis-
ciplinarity, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” from October, volumen. 8 (Cambridge: MIT Press,
Primavera, 1979), 30–44.
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CATHRYN DWYRE, principal of pneumastudio, received a Master of Land-
scape Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where she
was managing editor of ViaBooks, with a volume entitled Dirt. Dwyre is a
recipient of the MacDowell Colony fellowship and is visiting associate pro-
fessor at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture where she teaches design
studios and history/theory seminars.
CHRIS PERRY, principal of pneumastudio, received a Master of Architecture
degree from Columbia University. He is assistant professor at Rensselaer’s
School of Architecture, where he is also head of graduate studies and director
of the Geofutures Post-Professional Program. Prior to joining the faculty at
Rensselaer, Perry was the Louis Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale’s
School of Architecture. He is a recipient of the Architectural League of New
York’s Prize for Young Architects and The MacDowell Colony Fellowship,
and is co-editor of Collective Intelligence in Design.
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DWYRE and PERRY / Expanded Fields 7