" Koolhaas obviously wants to employ his program to affect positive social change and is concerned with the urban environment and the way it is used and abused by architecture. Tschumi, on the other hand, is more concerned with forging an open-ended approach that serves to interrogate structures and thus "do violence," in an aesthetic sense, to the urban environment: "Any relationship between a building and its users is one of violence, for any use means the intrusion of a human body into a given space, the intrusion of one order into another."
It is interesting to note that literature has played a firm role in the practices of both Koolhaas and Tschumi - as well as their respective conceptions of "Program" and "event." Koolhaas actually...
In such works as 1981's the Manhattan Transcripts, Tschumi departed from literary techniques stemming from the French nouveau roman movement. In the case of Koolhaas, one readily sees the writer at work in his notion of the "Program," since the Program is effectively a means of editing one's environment - just as the fiction writer will edit his novel or
short story before submitting it for publication. In predicating his architectural program on the event, Tschumi effectively hijacks the central premise that fiction is built on - that is, narrative occurrences or "events" that disrupt the natural order of things. This puts Tschumi effectively in line with the novelists of the nouveau roman, whose in-depth descriptions of events diverged from traditional literary models.
Bibliography
Foster, Hal. 2001. Bigness. London Review of Books. November 29.
Sadler, Simon. 1998. The Situationist City. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Tschumi, Bernard. 1994. Architecture and Disjunction. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 122.
