Beaubourg. What does Beaubourg mean? Art? Aesthetics?
Culture? No: It means circularity, storage, flux, whether
of individuals, objects or signs. And
that is what the architecture of Beaubourg says all too well, literally: it’s a cultural object, a cultural movement
of the obscure disaster of culture. What
is fantastic about it, if also involuntary, is that it brings out both culture and the thing to which it succumbs more and more,
the thing to which it has already succumbed—the perfusion, surfusion, and
confusion of all signs. So too with the
World Trade Center, the miracle of which is to give us, simultaneously, a
fantastic spectacle of the city and its verticality and a flagrant symbol of that
to which the city has succumbed, of that to which it has died as a historic
form. It’s precisely this that gives
such architecture its power: it is both
a form of extreme anticipation and of retrospective nostalgia for a lost
object.
Here
are just a few fragments of the primal scene of architecture as seen through
the imagination of a savage. You can
interpret them both literally and in all senses, as Rimbaud said. One of the possible senses being that there still
exists, beyond all illusion or disillusion, a future for architecture—something
I still believe in—even if this future isn’t exactly architectural. There is a future for architecture for the
simple reason that no one has yet invented the building, the architectural
object, that will put an end to all others, that will put an end to space
itself—neither the city that will be the end of all cities, nor the thought
that will be the end of all thoughts, even if that’s everyone’s ultimate dream. Though it can't be realized, there is still the
hope.
Translated by D. L. Sweet
Translated by D. L. Sweet
