Program event type classification and organization

Program and Event

One of the key aspects of Rem Koolhaas's architecture practice and theory is the Program. The Program, as defined by Koolhaas, has become synonymous with the rise of Modernist architecture throughout the 20th century. The Program is rooted in the idea of acting to edit function and human activities. Louis Sullivan was the first to popularize the idea of a Program in his famous maxim "form follows function." Koolhaas would come to interrogate the notion of the Program in his landmark work Delirious New York, in which he analyzed high-rise architecture in New York City. One of the diversions Koolhaas attempted to introduce to his practice early on was "cross-programming" - that is, introducing unexpected functions in room programs so as to disrupt the "natural" order of things. In a recent work, for example, Koolhaas attempted to incorporate hospital rooms for the homeless into his building for Seattle's public library - a proposal that was ultimately rejected.

Whereas Koolhaas predicates much of his design theory on this notion of the Program, Bernard Tschumi is more concerned with what he terms the "event." According to Tschumi, there is no space without event. For this reason, each architectural design should reinvent one's notion of living, rather than attempting to repeat or affirm established aesthetic or symbolic aspects of design. As such, Tschumi uses architecture as a means for framing what he terms "constructed situations" - a notion that was largely inspired by the Situationist International.

In their own respective ways, both Koolhaas and Tschumi are attempting to refute totalizing notions of a final architectural product. They want their buildings to reflect a reflexive environment that will not only frame events, but serve as a place for thinking about architecture and meditating on the very notion of such concepts as "Program" and "event." 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."