An urban park made of three superimposed systems: red folies on a 120-metre grid (points), two covered galleries and a winding promenade (lines), and great lawns (surfaces), laid over a site that keeps its canal, its iron market hall and its new museums.
The Parc de la Villette occupies the site of the old Paris slaughterhouses and cattle market in the north-east of the city, split by the Canal de l’Ourcq. For the competition of 1982–83 Bernard Tschumi proposed not a composed landscape but a method: three independent systems laid one over another, each complete, none subordinate. The points are the folies, red steel structures at every node of a 120-metre grid, each a 10.8-metre cube on a 3.6-metre sub-grid, broken and added to so that no two are alike. The lines are two straight covered galleries crossing the park and a winding “cinematic promenade” through a sequence of themed gardens. The surfaces are the great lawns, the circle and the triangle, left for whatever happens.
Where the systems meet an older building (the iron Grande Halle of 1867, the museum of science made from the unfinished auction hall, the Géode in its pool), the grid simply continues, a folie omitted here or there. Tschumi’s aim was disjunction: meaning made by events and collisions rather than by a hierarchy of axes. The park was shown at MoMA’s Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition in 1988.
The positions of the buildings and gardens here are simplified; the grid, the dimensions of the folies and the three systems follow Tschumi’s design.