SAJ: Serbian Architectural Journal, 14/3 (2022)
‘Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.’ – Henri Bergson
‘The most architectural thing about this building is the state of decay in which it is. Architecture only survives where it negates the form society expects of it. Where it negates itself by transgressing the limits that history has set for it.’1 Bernard Tschumi wrote these lines in one of his advertisements for architecture. The advertisement showed an image of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoy in an advanced state of decay. Each of the adds, published in the 1970s, was a manifesto of sorts, confronting the dissociation between the immediacy of spatial experience and the analytical definition of theoretical concepts.2
In our time of climate change and circular concepts, the reuse of buildings plays an increasingly important role. The contemporary re-use method seems spatially conservative in most cases, often dialectical in its juxtaposition of old and new, and neglects the opportunity to think of an architecture that goes beyond the edge of known space concepts.
We would like to argue that Tschumi’s transgression-methods can help us think beyond this re-use in a traditional manner. What if we cross the boundaries of thinking and acting? What are the speculative, artistic outcomes we don’t see yet? An active, contextual, performative, intervening design strategy, working with and in existing space, especially in re-use design, could offer the possibility of overcoming the impossibility of linking concept and spatial experience.3 Not a thought transgression but an acting transgression. So, which boundaries are there to cross?
Topics of interest for this issue include, but are not limited, to the areas:
Transgression in:
- design
- innovative design methodologies
- architects education methodologies
- tools for architecture
- body and space